At a previous company, we were using Rackspace Cloud for one of our sites, and we decided to double the size of the server as we were under a lot of load and needed some capacity fast.
Each step completed (the new server was spun up, the old server was backed up, etc.). Then it said it was going to take the server offline to do the actual clone of the disk from one to another. Then it took us to a screen saying 'Did everything complete properly? Yes/No', saying that clicking 'no' would just boot the old server back up again.
We waited for an hour, then two, then three, and the server still hadn't come back online. I didn't want to click 'no' in case it was something simple, so I called their support. After explaining what had happened to the guy, he told me to click 'Yes', which I did. Suddenly, the new server booted up and came back online. Support told me that when you get to that screen, you just hit 'Yes' and then your server boots up.
I couldn't help but think this was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. They take your server offline, tell you it's going to be back 'any minute now', and when it is, you tell them if it worked properly or not. In reality, your server stays offline until you say 'Yeah, everything's working great', at which point they bring it back online.
I still recommend them to people who need basic services, such as 'I need a dedicated server for my blog'. Amazon is flexible, but also very complicated for semi-pro users to deal with.
The whole resize thing is fraught with problems. It was one of the main reason I moved to Rackspace Cloud, but it's just way too unreliable. I'm too scared to use it on any mission critical servers due to unpredictable downtime.
If you're under high traffic and you try to resize the server the operation time hugely blows out. There's no way to block this TCP traffic other than changing DNS settings which is obviously undesirable and you might as well just manually setup a new server if you're going to do this (which is what I now tend to do). This process should be automated. It's an obvious bottleneck and fixing would dramatically improve their offering.
I didn't really mind Rackspace having all these issues at the beginning, but after 2 years I see no progress anywhere. Unlike AWS there's very little apparent investment in the infrastructure tools. Other cloud services have matured, but Rackspace hasn't. While the support at Rackspace is awesome, there's only so often I can hear someone apologizing. I'd rather the issues just got fixed and all this friction was reduced. Incredibly disappointed.
Each step completed (the new server was spun up, the old server was backed up, etc.). Then it said it was going to take the server offline to do the actual clone of the disk from one to another. Then it took us to a screen saying 'Did everything complete properly? Yes/No', saying that clicking 'no' would just boot the old server back up again.
We waited for an hour, then two, then three, and the server still hadn't come back online. I didn't want to click 'no' in case it was something simple, so I called their support. After explaining what had happened to the guy, he told me to click 'Yes', which I did. Suddenly, the new server booted up and came back online. Support told me that when you get to that screen, you just hit 'Yes' and then your server boots up.
I couldn't help but think this was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. They take your server offline, tell you it's going to be back 'any minute now', and when it is, you tell them if it worked properly or not. In reality, your server stays offline until you say 'Yeah, everything's working great', at which point they bring it back online.
I still recommend them to people who need basic services, such as 'I need a dedicated server for my blog'. Amazon is flexible, but also very complicated for semi-pro users to deal with.