7 ms·

The fact that in 2020 you have to fill in a contact form to get a quote for a server price is ridiculous...I just browsed their site and could not find a single

by usaphp 6y ago

The fact that in 2020 you have to fill in a contact form to get a quote for a server price is ridiculous...I just browsed their site and could not find a single mention of pricing without providing them with my full contact information

ralph84 6y ago
Selling one-off servers without any engagement with the customer isn't their business model. Has nothing to do with the year on the calendar.
staysaasy 6y ago
They're very enterprise focused, so you might not be the target customer? (I don't want to presume, however) For a lot of powerful but heavyweight enterprise products, giving people access to pricing isn't worth it because it can cause some buyers to opt out of the process earlier than they would if their hands were held. Especially if the integration process will require some element of digital/IT transformation and hence internal political wrangling. There's tech for smooth onboarding in 2020, but not necessarily tech for helping you to do stakeholder alignment in a sales context. The engineer in me finds this painful and wants to scream inside, but empirically this does work..
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > The engineer in me finds this painful and wants to scream inside, but empirically this does work.. If it doesn't make sense it's because it makes dollars...
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    This one is going in my memo book!
  - ricopags 6y ago
    Any attribution for that quote? Because I am going to steal it. Is it just a transposition of "If it doesn't make dollars it doesn't make sense" which I see as a headline a few places?
    - niea_11 6y ago
      It made me think of a rap song by DJ Quick : If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense https://genius.com/Dj-quik-dollaz-sense-lyrics https://genius.com/Dj-quik-dollaz-sense-lyrics
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      I first heard it in an MC Plus+ song: https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/MC_Plus%2B:Plastic_Actuals https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/MC_Plus%2B:Plastic_Actuals It’s also a pun: “sense” / “cents”.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    It makes sense. Enterprise sales processes are very very long and hand-holdy. The final price is very dependent on the amount of value a product brings to this particular organization. It also involves lots of negotiation. None of those fit in a pricing page. Maybe as a very dynamic calculator it could work, but it's likely the person looking at the page doesn't even have enough context/info to fill out the calculator.
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      Azure and AWS both have straightforward pricing calculators on their websites though.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        But if you are a large enterprise, you’re not going to just pay list price.
        sulam 6y ago
        I don't know about Azure, but AWS is also very transparent with their volume discounts. You know exactly what price you're going to get, without talking to sales. And they don't negotiate those discounts. (At least they don't up to the $50M / yr level, which is the highest I've directly observed.)
      - Swizec 6y ago
        Which is why a whole industry exists focused solely on helping you understand your AWS bill and how to optimize it. Right?
  - youeseh 6y ago
    Premature optimization is the root of all evil. If you don't need to automate, then don't automate!
    - bretpiatt 6y ago
      The interesting bit on this is Rackspace was actually the first build-to-order "Configure a Server [with pricing]" on the Internet in 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/20000302000851/http://www.rackspace.com/goconfigure/pricing.php3 https://web.archive.org/web/20000302000851/http://www.racksp...
- QUFB 6y ago
  Amazon learned with AWS that you can generate extreme profit when the devops team expenses instances/lambdas/absolutelyEverything on their company card. Click/click/click, spend. What is the result? Customers then create Organizations and accounts, and pay orders of magnitude more.
  - stingraycharles 6y ago
    I think the idea is that Rackspace wants to focus on a different target audience than AWS, and hence has a different sales process.
    - sswaner 6y ago
      Correct, my company uses both Rackspace and AWS. We host legacy platforms with low rates of change on Rackspace and use AWS for new work that has high change rates and requires flexibility.
    - QUFB 6y ago
      But Amazon gets the same audience, in addition to others! The initial spending on personal/corporate cards from engineers who need to get work done drives the adoption of AWS.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  Why do enterprises even initiate conversations with third parties if they won't immediately give you a price? Just move on to someone who will. If your options are $10,000 or <price unknown> its obvious option #2 will be more. If businesses categorically rejected working with companies that can't provide up-front estimates, they wouldn't be a thing.
  - evrydayhustling 6y ago
    For enterprise deals, the price is often a small part of the overall cost of ownership. The defining element of enterprise deals is complication: large companies don't tend to buy the product as advertised. They need the vendor to make lots of adjustments and carry out extra processes to deploy (or else those costs fall back on the buyer). So, until the buyer's requirements have been explored, there's not a useful estimate to be had.
    - tjalfi 6y ago
      This. There are no easy purchases in an enterprise. Working with any third party requires an NDA, contract review, and negotiations by our Purchasing department.
  - frenchy 6y ago
    Probably a simliar reason as why I won't normally give an up-front price when doing contracting work. For better, or for worse, "enterprise" folk are trying to sell "solutions" and not services. This usually works out well for them, because the people who they're selling to don't usually understand the technical minutae, and will often get the details wrong or incomplete.
  - dman 6y ago
    Because from an enterprise point of view they want to negotiate and arm twist vendors. Large players can and do use their weight to get pretty hefty discounts.
    - bityard 6y ago
brightball 6y ago
As I’ve gotten to better understand the enterprise sales space, face to face is the goal on both sides most of the time. There will be questions to answer, special circumstances to account for, term and support expectations and often a billing structure to fit with their budgeting process better. Pricing laid out up front is more of a consideration for smaller shops which isn’t their target market at all.
jblow 6y ago
We went through all this BS, then signed up with them on a year contract. Then we were shocked to find that it would take them two weeks to set up our first machine. I noped out of it at that point and just paid the penalty to get the hell out of there. A competing service, that we already used, sets up machines in 1-2 days. When stuff hits the fan and you really need things to happen, two weeks is just a crazy response time. That's like infinity in internet time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- genidoi 6y ago
  Was that in 2010?
- slyall 6y ago
  Someone told me something similar. Took 2 weeks to provision servers (and we mean VMs no just physical kit) and there was usually something wrong with them that took more time to fix. This was about 3 years ago. His company moved everything to AWS.
codegeek 6y ago
They probably don't sell the smaller plans. One of our clients has been trying to move away from rackspace and we looked into what she was paying for. Holy smokes. She is paying almost $1200/Month for a server that I can get from DigitalOcean, AWS or even a dedicated server provider for about $200/Month. Not kidding. Seriously overpriced and they lock in clients with multi year contracts. Beauty is that the so called "managed services" doesn't even patch the servers or update the libraries. Client could not even install letsencrypt SSL since the "server is not up to date" while she pays $1200/Month. Good for them but I am not buying that stock :)
paulgb 6y ago
On the opposite end of the spectrum, their cloud CDN scales down quite nicely, to the point that I get occasional bills for 1 cent for monthly usage. (I experimented with hosting some static things there years ago and left it up because it was costing too little to justify moving elsewhere)
james412 6y ago
I know it's a crazy and inconvenient idea, but you may be surprised by what happens when you talk to sales folk like this. I've knocked list price rates down by 80% by simply explaining to another human what I need
fluffernutter 6y ago
Maybe browsing sites manually isn't a sustainable strategy? g'rackspace pricing' yields: https://www.rackspace.com/calculator https://www.rackspace.com/calculator
walrus01 6y ago
> The fact that in 2020 you have to fill in a contact form to get a quote for a server price is ridiculous...I just browsed their site and could not find a single mention of pricing without providing them with my full contact information ISP perspective here: This absolutely has to be intentional. There has been a race to the bottom in pricing for dedicated bare metal x86 servers for close to 20 years now, in the hosting company industry. Very likely they're not going after the market of people who want to pay $165/mo for a server, but some considerably higher amount. A lot of the lower end dedicated server hosters who put prices (anywhere from $39/mo to $200/mo) directly on their website with a shopping cart are not their competition.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tomxor 6y ago
They are also absurdly expensive and their sales team are aggressive. While setting up infrastructure for my current employer I was required to get a quote from them as an existing customer. I expected them to be more expensive than everything else but it was a shock, at the time their IaaS was roughly 4 times the price of any competitor with some extreme limitations such as bandwidth with an expensive per GB rate if you go over. They also recommended dedicated hosting offering to set up an antiquated DB fail over system and claimed to offer 24 hour phone support for a total price I could have hired someone to work as a dedicated sysadmin. I went with Linode, over provisioning everything for a fraction of the price, I don't expect 24 hour support but stuff gets sorted out quickly when things go wrong on the other side of the hypervisor, Linode are also more transparent in my experience when pushed about issues. With Rackspace they make me feel the way that sleazy salesman that scares you into the extra insurance you get sold with hire cars and then feel like a fool for for afterwards - I can only assume their market is for people who would rather comfort themselves with expensive support than invest in the time to set up a reliable system with a DRP. ... that ended up way more negative than I expected, but, it's just my anecdote.
snowwrestler 6y ago
If you don’t want to talk to a person about a server, you probably don’t want to rent one from Rackspace anyway, because they charge extra for service on everything they sell.

by usaphp 6y ago

ralph84 6y ago

Selling one-off servers without any engagement with the customer isn't their business model. Has nothing to do with the year on the calendar.

staysaasy 6y ago

They're very enterprise focused, so you might not be the target customer? (I don't want to presume, however) For a lot of powerful but heavyweight enterprise products, giving people access to pricing isn't worth it because it can cause some buyers to opt out of the process earlier than they would if their hands were held. Especially if the integration process will require some element of digital/IT transformation and hence internal political wrangling. There's tech for smooth onboarding in 2020, but not necessarily tech for helping you to do stakeholder alignment in a sales context. The engineer in me finds this painful and wants to scream inside, but empirically this does work..

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> The engineer in me finds this painful and wants to scream inside, but empirically this does work.. If it doesn't make sense it's because it makes dollars...
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  This one is going in my memo book!
- ricopags 6y ago
  Any attribution for that quote? Because I am going to steal it. Is it just a transposition of "If it doesn't make dollars it doesn't make sense" which I see as a headline a few places?
  - niea_11 6y ago
    It made me think of a rap song by DJ Quick : If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense https://genius.com/Dj-quik-dollaz-sense-lyrics https://genius.com/Dj-quik-dollaz-sense-lyrics
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    I first heard it in an MC Plus+ song: https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/MC_Plus%2B:Plastic_Actuals https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/MC_Plus%2B:Plastic_Actuals It’s also a pun: “sense” / “cents”.
- Swizec 6y ago
  It makes sense. Enterprise sales processes are very very long and hand-holdy. The final price is very dependent on the amount of value a product brings to this particular organization. It also involves lots of negotiation. None of those fit in a pricing page. Maybe as a very dynamic calculator it could work, but it's likely the person looking at the page doesn't even have enough context/info to fill out the calculator.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Azure and AWS both have straightforward pricing calculators on their websites though.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      But if you are a large enterprise, you’re not going to just pay list price.
      - sulam 6y ago
        I don't know about Azure, but AWS is also very transparent with their volume discounts. You know exactly what price you're going to get, without talking to sales. And they don't negotiate those discounts. (At least they don't up to the $50M / yr level, which is the highest I've directly observed.)
    - Swizec 6y ago
      Which is why a whole industry exists focused solely on helping you understand your AWS bill and how to optimize it. Right?
- youeseh 6y ago
  Premature optimization is the root of all evil. If you don't need to automate, then don't automate!
  - bretpiatt 6y ago
    The interesting bit on this is Rackspace was actually the first build-to-order "Configure a Server [with pricing]" on the Internet in 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/20000302000851/http://www.rackspace.com/goconfigure/pricing.php3 https://web.archive.org/web/20000302000851/http://www.racksp...
QUFB 6y ago
Amazon learned with AWS that you can generate extreme profit when the devops team expenses instances/lambdas/absolutelyEverything on their company card. Click/click/click, spend. What is the result? Customers then create Organizations and accounts, and pay orders of magnitude more.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  I think the idea is that Rackspace wants to focus on a different target audience than AWS, and hence has a different sales process.
  - sswaner 6y ago
    Correct, my company uses both Rackspace and AWS. We host legacy platforms with low rates of change on Rackspace and use AWS for new work that has high change rates and requires flexibility.
  - QUFB 6y ago
    But Amazon gets the same audience, in addition to others! The initial spending on personal/corporate cards from engineers who need to get work done drives the adoption of AWS.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Why do enterprises even initiate conversations with third parties if they won't immediately give you a price? Just move on to someone who will. If your options are $10,000 or <price unknown> its obvious option #2 will be more. If businesses categorically rejected working with companies that can't provide up-front estimates, they wouldn't be a thing.
- evrydayhustling 6y ago
  For enterprise deals, the price is often a small part of the overall cost of ownership. The defining element of enterprise deals is complication: large companies don't tend to buy the product as advertised. They need the vendor to make lots of adjustments and carry out extra processes to deploy (or else those costs fall back on the buyer). So, until the buyer's requirements have been explored, there's not a useful estimate to be had.
  - tjalfi 6y ago
    This. There are no easy purchases in an enterprise. Working with any third party requires an NDA, contract review, and negotiations by our Purchasing department.
- frenchy 6y ago
  Probably a simliar reason as why I won't normally give an up-front price when doing contracting work. For better, or for worse, "enterprise" folk are trying to sell "solutions" and not services. This usually works out well for them, because the people who they're selling to don't usually understand the technical minutae, and will often get the details wrong or incomplete.
- dman 6y ago
  Because from an enterprise point of view they want to negotiate and arm twist vendors. Large players can and do use their weight to get pretty hefty discounts.
  - bityard 6y ago

brightball 6y ago

As I’ve gotten to better understand the enterprise sales space, face to face is the goal on both sides most of the time. There will be questions to answer, special circumstances to account for, term and support expectations and often a billing structure to fit with their budgeting process better. Pricing laid out up front is more of a consideration for smaller shops which isn’t their target market at all.

jblow 6y ago

We went through all this BS, then signed up with them on a year contract. Then we were shocked to find that it would take them two weeks to set up our first machine. I noped out of it at that point and just paid the penalty to get the hell out of there. A competing service, that we already used, sets up machines in 1-2 days. When stuff hits the fan and you really need things to happen, two weeks is just a crazy response time. That's like infinity in internet time.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
genidoi 6y ago
Was that in 2010?
slyall 6y ago
Someone told me something similar. Took 2 weeks to provision servers (and we mean VMs no just physical kit) and there was usually something wrong with them that took more time to fix. This was about 3 years ago. His company moved everything to AWS.

codegeek 6y ago

They probably don't sell the smaller plans. One of our clients has been trying to move away from rackspace and we looked into what she was paying for. Holy smokes. She is paying almost $1200/Month for a server that I can get from DigitalOcean, AWS or even a dedicated server provider for about $200/Month. Not kidding. Seriously overpriced and they lock in clients with multi year contracts. Beauty is that the so called "managed services" doesn't even patch the servers or update the libraries. Client could not even install letsencrypt SSL since the "server is not up to date" while she pays $1200/Month. Good for them but I am not buying that stock :)

paulgb 6y ago

On the opposite end of the spectrum, their cloud CDN scales down quite nicely, to the point that I get occasional bills for 1 cent for monthly usage. (I experimented with hosting some static things there years ago and left it up because it was costing too little to justify moving elsewhere)

james412 6y ago

I know it's a crazy and inconvenient idea, but you may be surprised by what happens when you talk to sales folk like this. I've knocked list price rates down by 80% by simply explaining to another human what I need

fluffernutter 6y ago

Maybe browsing sites manually isn't a sustainable strategy? g'rackspace pricing' yields: https://www.rackspace.com/calculator https://www.rackspace.com/calculator

walrus01 6y ago

> The fact that in 2020 you have to fill in a contact form to get a quote for a server price is ridiculous...I just browsed their site and could not find a single mention of pricing without providing them with my full contact information ISP perspective here: This absolutely has to be intentional. There has been a race to the bottom in pricing for dedicated bare metal x86 servers for close to 20 years now, in the hosting company industry. Very likely they're not going after the market of people who want to pay $165/mo for a server, but some considerably higher amount. A lot of the lower end dedicated server hosters who put prices (anywhere from $39/mo to $200/mo) directly on their website with a shopping cart are not their competition.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tomxor 6y ago

They are also absurdly expensive and their sales team are aggressive. While setting up infrastructure for my current employer I was required to get a quote from them as an existing customer. I expected them to be more expensive than everything else but it was a shock, at the time their IaaS was roughly 4 times the price of any competitor with some extreme limitations such as bandwidth with an expensive per GB rate if you go over. They also recommended dedicated hosting offering to set up an antiquated DB fail over system and claimed to offer 24 hour phone support for a total price I could have hired someone to work as a dedicated sysadmin. I went with Linode, over provisioning everything for a fraction of the price, I don't expect 24 hour support but stuff gets sorted out quickly when things go wrong on the other side of the hypervisor, Linode are also more transparent in my experience when pushed about issues. With Rackspace they make me feel the way that sleazy salesman that scares you into the extra insurance you get sold with hire cars and then feel like a fool for for afterwards - I can only assume their market is for people who would rather comfort themselves with expensive support than invest in the time to set up a reliable system with a DRP. ... that ended up way more negative than I expected, but, it's just my anecdote.

snowwrestler 6y ago

If you don’t want to talk to a person about a server, you probably don’t want to rent one from Rackspace anyway, because they charge extra for service on everything they sell.