Rackspace is very expensive... almost 2x their competitors. At work we left rackspace recently, because we needed to upgrade our server and it was going to jump

Rackspace is very expensive... almost 2x their competitors. At work we left rackspace recently, because we needed to upgrade our server and it was going to jump up to $1200! a month. Plus we found out that we were running on two year old discontinued hardware. Although we still had a SLA that didn't apply to hardware failures, which would be fixed on a 'best effort' basis and could mean a days-long outage. We moved (to the cloud ironically) and got a huge performance increase, for half the price (and that includes paying a company to monitor/manage it for us).