(from another board, this was posted by me about a year or so ago there) (disclaimer: my company offers colocation, but I also do syadmin work for customers th

(from another board, this was posted by me about a year or so ago there) (disclaimer: my company offers colocation, but I also do syadmin work for customers that use a specific web application server that I am expert at setting up) My experience with RS stems from a customer that felt he needed very high burst bandwidth availability, and proceeded to get a Cisco firewall, 2 Opteron servers and a certain amount of transfer from them. The time period was from about October or November 2005 thru to now, he is still a customer Good points: a) they have a decent trouble-ticketing system b) they have Cisco guys and Linux guys on-staff c) they have monitoring in place d) you can call them up Bad points a) bad HW: one of the Opteron servers kept rebooting under load. It would work fine until we unzipped some multi-GB files. It took RS a few days to get in the parts to replace it, and obviously, they did not do heavy-duty testing of the system before it went into production - I feel like 15 minutes with memtest86 would have caught it b) bad HW: a drive failed, became read-only somehow, they rebooted, fsck'ed it and said it needed to be replaced, of course. problem: they wanted to charge extra to image or transfer all the data from the old drive to the new drive. My take: they should do it for free, it is part of hardware maintenance - they wanted to leave it mounted as the secondary and then we were to move it over; alternatively, they could have offered to back it all up for us to the network backup, but they didn't. c) lock-in pricing practices: they want to charge A LOT of money when you want to upgrade some hardware. They figure it is easier for you to spend more, than to change all your IPs and switch to some other provider d) revenue enhancement: they want to sell you other services and push you to buy them. Any problem other than a basic one, is an excuse for them to suggest either a hardware upgrade or something else they will sell you. e) if it ain't LAMP (linux/apache/mysql/php), the techs will not have much of a clue. Part of the service I set up involved a different web server running on port 80 (needed for the web app server I mention), not Apache. The tech wasn't paying attention and reset things to use Apache. These are all just my opinions, your mileage may vary , etc.