I currently have 6 bare-metal boxes on SoftLayer and 4 managed boxes with Rackspace. I think both are great but both have their pros and cons. You're mainly loo

I currently have 6 bare-metal boxes on SoftLayer and 4 managed boxes with Rackspace. I think both are great but both have their pros and cons. You're mainly looking at a cost vs support trade-off. COST My 6 SoftLayer servers cost half of my 4 RS servers. So SoftLayer wins on cost. Also, Rackspace prefers contracts so keep that in mind. Don't be afraid to negotiate with them either. SUPPORT Rackspace on the other hand, excels with regards to support. You can call Rackspace at any time if you have an issue. They also seem to be more proactive with monitoring and preventative stuff (they will call you and say "Hey, this thing was failing so I fixed it"), whereas SoftLayer's monitoring is robotic and they don't do anything unless you file a ticket. RS also provides managed backup and it's been great for us (keep in mind we do traditional hosting, not a multi-tenant app). I've only had one major incident with SoftLayer (swapping out a RAID controller went bad and resulted in 6ish hours of downtime). No major incidents with Rackspace. So, Rackspace wins on support. OTHER Both have multiple data centers and performance seems great (though I don't have actual benchmarks to prove that). Most of our servers are in Dallas. One thing I like about SoftLayer is you can get things up faster. A new server is setup real quick (within hour(s)) whereas Rackspace can take a couple days. SWAG I have 2 Rackspace t-shirts and 2 SoftLayer t-shirts. So, that's a toss up :)