Any long/short time followers of mine will know that I’ve been critical of Rackspace in the past. Robert Scoble claims Rackspace is his favorite company and promotes his FastCompany.tv flick. For those who want to see Scoble’s interview, it’s embedded below. I have to admit, after 20 minutes - I got a little bored.

I did, however, found this gem interesting - the entry price point for equipment with Rackspace is $300! I thought that steep in a world where servers are available for $1,500 (or less - comparing against a Rackspace $300 dollar machine). Consider a $2000 machine over 3 years depreciation ($55/month) plus power and ping ($100/u from he.net totaling up to $155/month). For the cost of a single Rackspace machine, you get a fully equipped machine racked with power and ping for almost 1/2 the price. For the remaining $145/month, install a firewall and hire a tech to run “yum” or “Window’s Update” (don’t fool yourself, that’s all that Rackspace does). Backup is an important feature to be sure - be don’t fool yourself, Rackspace passes that cost on to you as well.

Good technology is expensive, but people are more so. While they knock Google etc in the video for allowing 10% of a cluster to be “down” before dealing with it - it’s a pure numbers game. It’s cheaper to let 10% of your servers be off-line than it is to keep someone onboard to keep them up and running 24/7.

Another side note: I’m a big fan of Scobelizer - and looking forward to reading Naked Conversations when it arrives from Amazon with my other must reads next week - but, it was kind of sad to hear how many times the word “Segate” was dropped during the video. I know they’re a sponsor - but WTF?

I’m not sure when my love affair with Rackspace ended. Perhaps it was when we were brushed off as a client or when they began having catastrophic problems with their data centers. Either way, I thought it was funny when I saw an email today that they now have a corporate blog. I’ve been critical of Rackspace before and just wanted to highlight this additional failure of them as a company. With the astronomical fees they charge for server hosting, you would think they could have hired a PR firm a long time ago to tell them to get involved with their customers. This just seems like another last ditch effort to bring themselves into a web 2.0 culture that’s ready to move into new directions. They even have a token welcome to our blog entry from February. Someone please provide them some assistance with URL rewriting. The real test will be to see if they delete this trackback or are actually open to feedback and criticism on their blog.

Some folks may be asking why I don’t unsubscribe from their mailing lists… quite simply, I enjoy having fodder for these occasional rants.