For those of you who may not know, Rackspace is a U.S. based hosting company, with an office in the UK. You may be checking them out and wondering whether it is worth the money to go with Rackspace. After all they do have some larger clients, they have nice smiley customer service faces on their website, but is the hosting really worth the money they charge?
EcoSwitch were a client of Rackspace until last year and we’ve decided to share our experience with our readers. Unfortunately, the experience wasn’t a great one and their solicitors have now written to us to top it off! Read on…
EcoSwitch initially migrated its website to Rackspace in 2008 to trial their new ‘green hosting’. As an ethical, green lifestyle guide, we wanted to ‘walk the talk’ and make sure that our hosting was powered by 100% Renewable Energy which we were told it was.
We also asked for a dedicated server to ensure that we had 100% up-time.
Initially everything was fine albeit the website loaded surprisingly slow. We asked for assistance with this. Give Rackspace their due, their staff were contactable but that didn’t resolve the problem and they then said they would be increasing costs.
We thought about switching (particularly as we’re an eco switching site!) but first asked for a discount and our Account Manager Flora Kamaldeep (now Flora Sandhu) set up a ‘contra-deal’ over the phone where we were asked to write an independent review about Rackspace’s green credentials, provide them a listing in our green directory and get them traffic to their site.
The objective? To help Rackspace get new traffic to their website and managed green hosting clients. In return, Rackspace agreed to pay EcoSwitch £250 per month (£3K per annum) and EcoSwitch would pay Rackspace £322 or more per month (£3864 per year). This would bring the cost down of hosting to around £70 per month.
Given that many hosting companies such as The Eco Host charge only £65 per month for a dedicated server, are English owned and London based, we seriously thought about switching there and then. But because we were already with Rackspace and they had agreed a contra-deal with us, we didn’t mind paying a few pounds extra per month to stay with Rackspace. We also wanted to help promote Rackspace as they said they were going to become an even greener hosting company in time.
THE WORK ECOSWITCH DID FOR RACKSPACE:
We published the following online review for Rackspace:
And got Rackspace indexed in Google on the front page under their keywords:
And the article is still indexed on the front page of google in 2012 when it was written in 2009! All those years of continued website ranking benefit, traffic and customers for Rackspace – all introduced by EcoSwitch.
EcoSwitch also included Rackspace in the Green Directory:
And finally, a front page link from the EcoSwitch site saying ‘Powered by Rackspace’ was created to help Rackspace maximise their traffic and search engine rankings.
THE REWARD? PAYMENT (OR IN THIS CASE NON-PAYMENT) BY RACKSPACE
EcoSwitch invoiced Rackspace for Year 1′s worth of hosting payable at £250 per month but they then ran into problems. We were assured by our Account Manager Flora Kamaldeep that we would be paid and we also chased the matter up with their accounts clerk Mariam Clark but in Year 2, nothing had been resolved.
EcoSwitch continued to pay Rackspace in good faith because £3k was owed by this point and Year 2′s invoice was also due for Directory inclusion and continued hosting of their independent review. They had also asked us for a dedicated link from the front page of our website which we provided at the time to help their website rankings.
Flora Sandhu then got taken off our account and a new person put in charge – John Webb. He said there was no agreement.
EXCUSES FOR NON PAYMENT BY JOHN WEBB OF RACKSPACE…

John Webb then surprised us when he said nothing at all would be paid!
FLORA SANDHU OF RACKSPACE THEN CONTRADICTS HER BOSS JOHN WEBB…
Flora Sandhu (formerly Kamaldeep Sandhu), then sent an e-mail to John Webb and somehow copied in EcoSwitch colleagues contradicting what her boss John Webb had said about there being no agreement.
Internally, Rackspace knew full well what was going on – let’s find any excuse not to pay partners and suppliers shall we?! John Webb probably didn’t expect his junior to confirm in writing that a deal had been reached with EcoSwitch!
Just why is it that some large corporates abuse their position, messing with the lives and cash-flow of small businesses? It reminds me of how Railtrack failed to admit to liability for those two girls that got run down by a train due to their failure to install the correct safety equipment at rail crossings. If Railtrack had just admitted it in the first place, people wouldn’t have been so angry with them!
SETTLEMENT – THE MONEY ON OFFER FROM RACKSPACE (A JOKE?)
To settle the matter, John Webb’s team member Daniel Cunningham then offered £250 one off rather than the £250 per month for 2 years (£6K) and at the same time tried to claim for 3 months of hosting when they had been taking our website offline presumably to try and force our hand. We tried to explain to them that the only reason EcoSwitch were staying with Rackspace was to recover the money owed from them. We pointed out that even if the alleged debt of £1000 owing from EcoSwitch to Rackspace for the final 3 months hosting was a genuine debt, it would still leave Rackspace owing EcoSwitch circa £5K.
EcoSwitch naturally refused the offer which we found insulting, particularly given the hosting of their article we’d provided our end and the new traffic and customers they will have gained from our site over such a long period. Bear in mind, Rackspace would have only had to get one customer like us to cover the cost for our services over two years.
Rackspace then became more difficult and our website went offline altogether damaging the EcoSwitch google rankings, traffic and revenues. Not the kind of treatment you’d expect them to give a ‘partner’, particularly when we are a social enterprise and a much smaller operation than Rackspace given our specialism in the ‘green’ niche of the market.
We are not asking for sympathy here but we feel more of a voice for small enterprises up against the fat corporates like Rackspace who get big through trying to crush the small guy. We dislike David vs Goliath battles, hence the need for articles like this to expose those companies that like to try it on in the hope the small guy will just go away. We don’t think so!
ECOSWITCH RESPONSE
With the EcoSwitch website offline and no sign of any payment from Rackspace, we then had no option but to stop paying our monthly invoice. With the loss of goodwill, we moved our website ‘backup file’ (lucky we had it) to another green hosting company (The Eco Host.com). Unlike Rackspace, these guys are genuinely green because they power their whole data center with Renewable Energy as opposed to just planting trees.
Since leaving Rackspace, they have appointed solicitors and are threatening to take EcoSwitch to court. On what basis – we have no idea? We will of course relish the opportunity to defend ourselves and let the truth prevail.
We digress. So is Rackspace green hosting worth the money? In our opinion, a server is a server and as long as a data center has energy efficient servers, backup in place and power it with 100% Renewable Energy, then the only other factor to really consider is – which is the least cost option? Don’t waste your money. All data centers tend to have backups nowadays anyway, so any dedicated server costing more than £100 per month really isn’t worth the money.
We will keep you posted on any significant developments relating to Rackspace. If you want to check out their green credentials (remember they plant trees to make their hosting green), visit Rackspace Green Hosting – you decide if it is worth the money! But we don’t recommend you do any deals with them because the new management may not honour them and their team perhaps aren’t as ‘smiley’ as their adverts first suggest.
Posted under Articles, Computer & Internet
This post was written by Moderator on February 2, 2012
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