Rackspace - you wish for simplicity - what you get is simply choice

Everyone I talk to in digital marketing and everyone who wants to be a technical expert has an opinion on Rackspace. In reality, when it comes to virtualisation, hosting servers, scalability and choice, the price you pay to Rackspace can be significantly less then you pay to other providers.

But at what cost? It seems that freedom is the price you pay and freedom to choose is confusing.

1p per hour for a server is a problem

The problem with Rackspace is the pricing model. A basic web server in the UK costs 1p per hour or £7.30 per month.  You start with a choice from about 10 different flavours of Linux and you can setup and then configure your server any way you want it. The problem, as one colleague said, is they have no visual interface with a 1-click installer for WordPress, Drupal, etc. It’s totally up to you.

You’ll spend more time on it, just cause it’s nearly ‘free’

When was the last time you paid so little for so much freedom of choice. In fact, normally the best price usually has the least flexibility. Needless to say for such little up front cost, I’ve spent the day learning how to setup a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) with WordPress.

It seems to me, that when something we value as important costs next to nothing, then brute force and mental resources will help to achieve more … Yet we could be paying for the more expensive hosting option along with a simple 1-click installer and not had to be so personally involved. You can’t realise a cost-benefit for using Rackspace, if you had to spend the better part of a day setting up the server. It makes 1p per hour feel more like a days hard work.

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.