RackSpace Drupal Hosting Review 2021

RackSpace Drupal Hosting Review & Rating

RackSpace powers over 10,000 Drupal websites up till now, and the company welcomes people to take an active part in the crowd by announcing good reliability and technical support of the hosting service. Besides the two factors, our experienced editors have also taken a thorough look at the other very important factors in price, features and performance.

Before the in-depth analysis on the company, we have done a lot of research among real customers to collect their opinions on the hosting experience with the provider, at the same time, kept monitoring the hosted Drupal website with the cloud hosting service every 5 minutes for over 6 months. As a result, we worked out an overall rating chart concerning about the mentioned aspects as following.

Price& Features

It costs $150/mo for people to host a Drupal website on RackSpace cloud sites, the basic plan of which is integrated with multiple useful features including unlimited hosted domains, 50GB storage, 500GB bandwidthand 10,000 compute cycles per month.

Meanwhile, the company facilitates 1-click Drupal setup by providing 1-click installer, with which even a website newbie is capable of installing the CMS just in one minute. Besides, people have the ability to fully control over the website by using the Cloud Control Panel, which enables customers to organize and manage the cloud infrastructure through a simple, intuitive graphical interface.

If people are running websites requiring more resources, they have access to the following ones, but need spend a portion of money.

SSL capacities: $20/mo.
Domain name registration: $10/yr.
Storage: $2/GB, bandwidth: $0.18/GB & compute cycles: $0.02/compute cycle.

Guarantees
Holding the truth that even the best Drupal sites are worthless when they go down, the company takes over the burden of customers’ worrying about websites reliability by demanding technicians work 24×7 to make sure the sites up and running. To show the confidence in providing great reliability, it claims 99.9% uptime guarantee.

From what we have tested in the past 30 days, the website uptime is good, which averages to 99.91%. Apart from the constant server and network monitoring, the success comes from many aspects mainly concerning about the scheduled maintenance, utilization of UPS, PDUs and cabling, and the replacement of any failed hardware including processors, RAM and hard disks.

Once customers are not experiencing the longest uptime as they expected, the host promises to credit their account 5% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of network downtime and up to 100% of the monthly fee for the affected server.

Performance

RackSpace has nine data centers in six regions including Chicago, Dallas, Northern Virginia, London, Hong Kong and Sydney, where highly trained specialists are running the infrastructure by using many cutting-edge equipments like high-performance bandwidth, fiber carriers, secure systems provided by Cisco and Arbor Networks.

Comparing with the good reliability, the performance part is a little bit frustrating, because the testing result of the average server response time in the past 30 days is 783ms which islonger than the average figure of 608ms in hosting market.

In fact, the hosting speed can be faster as long as people spend some extra money to buy a dedicated server, combining with the public cloud, they will surely achieve the ultimate performance.

Technical Support

RackSpace puts customers’ needs at the first place, so it lays much emphasis on the quality of technical support varying from 24×7 live chat, phone and ticket, which are the most recommended communicating channels for customers to seek instant, efficient and professional help due to the support staffs are all with years of technical support experience.

Usually,requesting the answers to the common issues about Drupal installation, development, configuration or optimization, customers are able tosearch the results in knowledgebase, blogs and communities where experienced customers have shared the solutions for your need.