For those of you who may not know, Rackspace is an international web hosting company, with offices across the globe including the US, UK, Netherlands, Hong-Kong and Australia. You may be checking them out and wondering whether it is worth the money to go with Rackspace? After all they have many large clients, a serious commitment to 24/7 customer service, a claim of 100% up-time (when most companies can only manage 99%) but is the hosting worth the money charged? From our recent experience – absolutely yes – and here’s why.
EcoSwitch were a client of Rackspace until last year when we thought it would be a good idea to see if we could reduce costs by moving to another hosting provider. Unfortunately it turned out to be a false economy – although the service was cheaper, the old adage applies ‘you get what you pay for’. Only a short time after switching our site to a new hosting provider, it went completely off-line. We clicked the ‘on-line’ customer service button but no-one answered, even when it was listed as being ‘online’. We sent e-mails with screenshots of our non-existent website alerting them to our site being offline, but even those fell on deaf ears. We then phoned their offices and the call was forwarded to a personal Orange Mobile answerphone with no subsequent returned call. You can make up your own mind about the level of (non-existent) customer service. The new hosting company did eventually get back in touch and apologized profusely (hence we don’t feel the need to now name and shame them), but by this time we had already decided enough was enough.
We had, by this time told Rackspace that we were moving back to them as soon as possible. Being an on-line social enterprise ourselves, the cost of the site being down for many days was substantial and something we could ill-afford.
BACKGROUND OF RACKSPACE MANAGED GREEN HOSTING AND WHY THEY WERE CHOSEN
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 as green as possible. A lot of companies like to be ‘seen to be green’ but Rackspace have introduced a number of initiatives over several years that have helped keep them ahead of their competition. So what exactly is ‘green’ about Rackspace’s hosting? Below is a review of some of their initiatives:
REVIEW OF RACKSPACE’S GREEN HOSTING CREDENTIALS (WELL WORTH THE MONEY!):
In terms of Rackspace’s green credentials, they have introduced a number of measures:
1. Reduced energy consumption
Rackspace have installed the latest power efficient hardware including dual-core Dell AMD Opteron low voltage processors and Intel Xeon servers. These have SFF hard drives and DDR2 memory which means that they consume considerably less power. Reducing energy consumption is a key component of any ‘green’ hosting data-centre and is the most important criteria in our opinion. With less energy consumption, there is obviously going to be less waste of our finite energy resources and consequently less pollution.
2. Creation of energy efficient facilities
Their new data centre in Slough comprises of 55,000 square feet of net technical space and been purpose built to ensure the efficient use of energy through the use of ambient cooling technology. This power efficient cooling technology utilises the cooler outside air temperature where possible.
3. Carbon offsetting through Tree Planting
For every new customer that takes out Green Hosting, Rackspace plants a tree to help absorb some of the Carbon Dioxide generated from the equipment used to host each new website. Rackspace have planted over 11,000 trees in the UK, filling two sites in Pembrokeshire, Wales and another in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. Their third site is not up and running where they are currently planting 1,000 trees per year. In 2011, Rackspace commenced the planting of 10,000 trees in Kenya – trees in the Tropics are particularly effective at absorbing CO2 due to their year round foliage and the ideal growing conditions.
4. Employee education and implementation of internal initiatives
Rackspace use green cleaning products, paper from sustainable sources and recycle their aluminium, paper, cardboard and plastic. They have contracted a firm called PaperRound to make sure this happens and the local council assist with this. The success of the program led to 2,130 kg of paper and 185 kg of cans and plastic bottles being recycled saving the equivalent of 25 trees or 10,900kWh of energy!
RACKSPACE’S AWARD WINNING GREEN HOSTING:
Rackspace don’t claim to have the total answer but their ‘green’ initiatives are in their words ‘designed to support its commitment to contributing towards the larger environmental solution’. Rackspace were in fact the first hosting company to introduce greener hosting and their plan is to continue working hard to be as green as possible by introducing more initiatives.
In recognition of their efforts towards the environment, the prestigious Green IT Magazine awarded Rackspace ‘Green IT Operator of the Year’ award in 2010 and the Green ‘Team of the Year’ award in 2011. These awards provide a benchmark by which IT companies are measured in terms of their environmental performance. They reward companies that run energy efficient operations or are particularly good at sustainability communications – for example, making staff, customers and the supply chain more aware about green issues, initiatives, products and lifestyle products. Readers selected Rackspace from some 75 different entries.
WHAT OTHER FACTORS DID ECOSWITCH LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY?
1. A DEDICATED SERVER – MORE SECURE AND 100% UP-TIME
Back in 2008, EcoSwitch asked for a dedicated server to ensure that we had 100% up-time and didn’t share with anyone else (apparently more secure). Both of these factors were very important to us. Even 1% downtime would cost EcoSwitch a fortune with customers being unable to switch to greener products and services.
The reason Rackspace are able to guarantee 100% uptime is because they have back up power generation in the event of power cuts. Similarly, they have informed us that they have never had a breach of security on any of their client’s websites since they commenced hosting operations. This is due to their formidable team of security specialists and their list of high profile clients whose privacy can not be compromised under any circumstances.
2. REPUTATION, TESTIMONIALS AND CLIENTS
It goes without saying that it is important to get client testimonials before switching to a new hosting provider. Rackspace have plenty – 170,000 customers globally to be exact as well as an impressive list of large corporate clients and organisations including Domino’s Pizza, the MOD, GoCompare and the consumer ‘Which?’ Magazine.
3. A HIGH LEVEL OF CUSTOMER SERVICE
Enjoy customer service teams that can help you with any technical query 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year. As a Rackspace customer, you can go onto their website and chat with a live assistant at any time, you can raise a ticket online and they will answer your query without delay, you can get through to them on the phone anytime and can always email them if required. There are no long queues and they pride themselves on a the best service possible.
From experience, when an individual’s work depends upon the website and the internet, there is nothing worse than a website going down, being unable to send e-mails and being unable to get in touch with the website hosting provider to resolve the issue. Rackspace have got the service thing sorted. Just check out their website! They certainly give a strong sense that they truly care about their customers.
4. THE COST OF RACKSPACE CLOUD AND MANAGED HOSTING PACKAGES:
Rackspace’s ‘cloud’ hosting package is immensely popular with prices starting from £65 per month (prices as at 02/03/2012) the last time we checked (should be very affordable for small business) but if you are a medium to larger sized business or just want the best quality hosting you can get, go for their dedicated managed servers which are the Rolls-Royce of green hosting products starting from £598 per month.
There are other companies out there like Heart Internet, Fasthosts, the EcoHost and a few others that we researched, but they aren’t backed by the same quality or level of customer service, uptime and reliability as our friends at Rackspace. Thank goodness our website is back in safe hands and we recommend them highly to you and so do two other comparison services – the Which? magazine and Go Compare.
To enquire about Cloud Hosting products, visit Rackspace’s green hosting in the cloud.
To enquire about Managed Hosting, visit Rackspace’s managed green hosting page.
To enquire about Dedicated Green Server Hosting, visit Rackspace’s dedicated server hosting page.
Posted under Articles, Computer & Internet
This post was written by William Worthington on February 2, 2012
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