They used to be amazing. 15 years ago if you rented a server from them you were getting a sysadmin into the bargain. For companies without that expertise in house (or who didn’t need enough to justify a full time position) and for whom shared hosting wasn’t an acceptable alternative, they were the perfect option.

Early on, their deal was that when you called, you always got a human. 24x7. I called early Sunday morning. Human after 2 rings, transferred to the correct dept within 15 seconds, to another real human, who took acknowledged and took care of a tech problem within a few minutes.

I'm not sure there's any place you can get that sort of service now, which is part of the reason I run my own servers and dug more in to sysadmin stuff. Yes, my stuff's in a remote data center, and I can't physically touch it. Assuming there's a dumb pipe coming in, I can handle everything else (or find someone who can) - I don't need handholding service bundled in to a price.

That level of service is definitely available when you're talking enterprise-level contracts, but those are worth much more than $1k/month. At only $1k/month you aren't going to get that kind of service in many places.

I think at the time - 1999(?) (soon after rackspace had started up) we were at a $500/month server.

And... they made a mistake early on. We'd requested a new machine, but someone had done the ticket wrong, and took the old one offline for an upgrade (instead of just adding a new machine to the account). They were minutes away from wiping it when I called - if I'd had an automated attendant, we would have lost everything on there, but humans intervened to stop them in time and get it back online. "Great service!" - except they'd made the mistake in the first place...

You can get that level of support for a minimum of $100 or 10% of your bill on AWS. Their support is excellent. You could always pay for a dedicated host with AWS and reserved pricing.

Is this really true? I've never had this experience with paid AWS support, even spending a lot more than $100/mo (although not as much as Lyft).

Rackspace support ca. 2004 was really fanatical. Like you could call them and get an engineer on the line, working on e.g. your RAID card, in minutes. Without going through a ticketing system or other intermediaries. Some of this was no doubt due to them being a smaller company, but "Fanatical Support" was not just marketing hype.

Most issues I’ve used AWS support for were because of my own lack of knowledge. But they are batting 100 so far. I usually use chat.

So far they have helped me with:

- S3 permissions loading files to RedShift and Aurora

- binary file support with API Gateway and lambda with CloudFormation

- a cross account Code Pipeline with CodeBuild, Code Deploy and CloudFormation - ended up you can’t do it fromthr vonfold.

- some problem a coworker was having with DAX (DynamoDB cache) with Python.