A couple of times these past few months I’ve had nightmares or even woken up in a cold sweat about a catastrophe involving downtime on our server. Unfortunately, these nightmares were caused by real life events that have happened to me a few months prior with ZeroPriceTags.  Users always thought I had taken off overnight and ran with their money within 6 hours… I always had a lot of explaining to do.

A couple of nights ago, we experienced a server going down with one of our offers and it made us furious.  The offer went down right as we went to sleep around 1:00 – 2:00 AM therefore we saw about a $2,000 loss before we caught it.  Fortunately, the affiliate network is going to pay us for the loss because of lack of notification and also because we are loyal affiliates.  Sure, there’s nothing we could have done but we want to eliminate the possibility of downtime on our end as much as possible because it could happen to us as easily as it could happen to them.  Sometimes servers just stop working because they need a reboot.

Sure, HostGator (who we use now on ZeroPriceTags) is great and their Cisco protection has saved me from many “cyberterrorists” who have threatened to keep me down for weeks if I didn’t pay them a large bounty in e-gold (Not even kidding). However, I much prefer a 100% guarantee of uptime, and fanatical support wouldn’t hurt either… as much as they advertise it, it must be great. Right now this blog is hosted on TheHostRack, and although we are very happy with them too, we are thinking of moving all of our websites to RackSpace, who guarantee 100% uptime.  The bill is a little more steep than what we are currently paying but as long as it helps me sleep easier, I don’t have a problem footing the bill…

Has anyone had any  firsthand experience with Rackspace?  Is their support really “fanatical”?  Is there anyone better than RackSpace that you have worked with? We’d love to hear your opinion.