Re: Exodus vs Rackspace

I mentioned this to Jade previously, but thought I'd throw it to the group as well. We've got clients at both centers - an Exodus facility in Chicago and Rackspace down in Texas. Exodus ------ More locations, generally a larger. *Feels* like a larger firm. (Doesn't mean better, just larger). Support - we've had to contact tech support a few times, and it's always 'leave a message, we page a tech guy, and they call you back'. We had a couple problems with them - our role in the project is software, and the client used an existing vendor (local to them in Chicago) for hardware decisions. Exodus recommended a particular firewall to use with the Windows NT server farm. Turns out the firewall had a problem with sending bulk email from standard Windows SMTP and shutdown access to and from that machine. The details are sketchy, partially because I wasn't physically there (and others were), but the gist of it was that * Exodus wouldn't support the hardware they'd recommended ('that's a vendor issue') * The firewall manufacturer stated *after* we had this problem that they knew there was a problem sending mail from standard SMTP service, and that we should use Exchange or Notes. Don't even ask me how sending mail from Notes is different from an SMTP server, cause I can't figure it out... I'm just repeating the generalizations of that experience with Exodus. Rackspace ---------- Generally feels a bit smaller, but still first rate. *ANYTIME* you call a human answers. I don't think they've even invested in a phone tree system. I've called at 2:30am on a Saturday morning and had a human answer. Often 'after hours' calls go straight thru to tech support, which just shortens the whole support procedure. I've often had techs handle my issue right on the phone when I call, taking care of upgrades, etc. They may move away from the immediacy as they grow, but I think they know a selling point is their 'live answer' aspect. One bad issue with them - there was a paperwork mixup and they took a machine offline (we'd requested a different machine be taken off months before, but the request got processed again with the wrong number). So we were in accessible for about 30 minutes one Monday morning. Again, the phone calls answered by humans helped avoid making a big mistake into an even bigger one, as people scrambled to fix the blunder. So, neither company is perfect, ime. Rackspace is, in my experience, generally cheaper, but I'm only going on what our client's situations dictated - your mileage may vary. I think Exodus has a larger 'worldwide' network of datacenters, but I do know that Rackspace just moved into the UK recently, and may expand further around the globe in the coming months and years. Hope that helps someone else out there too - I'd be happy to discuss more details privately for those of you that want to contact me. Jade Ohlhauser wrote: > Well our schedule has been accelerated again. I've received from good > comments from people, but I want to through this out again. > > The host has to be able to a million visitors a day, multiple servers, > worldwide caching, 24hr support, etc. I've narrowed it down to Exodus and > Rackspace, but I'm open to other suggestions. Please send me anything, > positive or negative. We will be running Apache, PHP and Oracle on either > Sun/Solaris or (IBM or Dell or suggestions?)/*nix > > ............. Jade Ohlhauser > [website architect]........... http://bandwidthplace.com > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net > For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net > To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net -- ========================== Michael Kimsal http://www.tapinternet.com PHP Training courses http://www.tapinternet.com/php