I recently had a very, very poor experience with them and their Managed AWS Cloud Services. I escalated and the sales rep stated "I'll share your feedback with leadership." Haven't heard another single word out of him. As you can imagine, their days as a vendor are numbered.

what was the use case when they wanted you to have a load balancer for a single server..?

I've gotten the same recommendation from them. I complained because they pulled the network connection on the drive connected to the database and completely torched the drive. They were like: well maybe you should consider running multiple database machines with replication so you can survive the next time we screw things up.

This is true for all VPS hosting. They're cheap because they're commodity hardware that sometimes fails.

Full VPS backup should be standard feature of all premium providers...

You'd think, but then they lose that easy upsell.

And get tons of support requests and risk their brand name.

This sounds to me more like a procedural than a hardware failure.

I was told it was to avoid changing my DNS when I spun up a new server. With the load balancer being $50/month; that was the pitch that put me off Rackspace.

The LB itself (in IAD) is $10.95/month + traffic.

This was exactly it.

I don't know about the poster above, but commonly load balancers can be used to do SSL termination, which can significantly improve application performance.

I want add that their UI is awful too. Errors and slowness and their imaging system is constantly failing. We're testing out vultr for cost, speed and simplicity.

Vultr seems to take longer than digital ocean to get to a prompt from creation. But if you're not rapidly spinning up dozens a day it may not matter.

I also feel like they don't communicate maintenance windows or outages as well as they should.

But I still use them because they have a Dallas location and DO doesn't.

I was at RAX back in the early cloud days. The console has a long and sordid history. I was under the impression they bought CloudKick just to get the team to build a better console. Somewhat surprised it's still bad; somewhat not.

Thing is, their product has been inferior for years! You wouldn't believe how bad it used to be. The current state of rackspace cloud is great, compared to how it was in 2010.