Earlier this month Rackspace switched away from offering any servers without managed support, even in their cloud. So every server or VM you get from Rackspace now will come with 24/7/365 support, including phone calls with engineers.

That's the main reason their stuff is more expensive than AWS, Linode, Digital Ocean, etc. They just decided that their competitive edge is support, so they aren't going to compete with those guys on price any more. This will probably lose them customers in startups, but improve their margins overall.

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/newsarticles/rackspace-goes-al...