I think that many choose Slicehost because they don't care about price all that much and/or believe it will be more stable (which may or may not be true)

I, for one, prefer to use VPS that is cheaper than that, offers more traffic and I believe will still be good enough.

I'm sure knowing that it's backed by Rackspace is reassuring for some people.

...despite Rackspace's well-publicized downtime, which has prompted prominent sites to move away from them?

One of my local competitors recently, proudly, informed me that they were about to launch a new hosting service supported by Rackspace. I smiled, and congratulated them, and started planning the marketing campaign I'd like to run when Rackspace goes down and takes my competitors' clients with them.

Well, in a word, yes. Everyone has downtime. Rackspace's downtime just makes more noise because lots of well-known sites are hosted there.

> Everyone has downtime.

http://reports.panopta.com/cloudharmony/

> Rackspace's downtime just makes more noise because lots of well-known sites are hosted there.

Not as many as there used to be.

I don't mean to be a jerk, but it's one thing when my site goes down because I did something dumb, and a whole 'nother thing when a site goes down, these days, because a data center is having a problem. I just don't understand why someone would assume that downtime was inevitable and not choose to minimize that risk as much as possible.

Some would suggest that the best way to minimize that risk is not to look at who hasn't had downtime in the last two years, but instead to host your app with more than one provider.

(of course, if you take that route, you probably want to go with two different low-cost providers.)

Everyone has downtime that isn't their fault.

And, oddly, according to your link Rackspace Cloud Dallas has 100% uptime which 1) I don't think is true and 2) doesn't seem to support your point.