Hm. Well, I don't like them. It's subjective, you might disagree. But off the top of my head:
1. Contracts. They want 1 years minimum contracts for any dedicated servers. For truly gargantuan orders I could understand this but for one puny server? Never.
2. Their definition of "cloud" is different from mine. To use their "cloud" services your servers need to be public facing, ie on public IPs. Want them on your own VPN? You can stil get the cloud prices but not the API. you create and cancel servers via tickets. This is different from VPS how?
3. Sloooow provisioning - even if you are able to use their "public cloud" API to provision a server - prepare to wait hours for it to be done, leading me to suspect it does nothing more than email a tech to provision a VPS and hook it up somehow. Oh, you can't pause them to save money either, again making me think these "cloud" servers are nothing more than slicehosts with an extra layer of abstraction
re 3) I'm not sure specifically what happened in your case, but generally servers are provisioned and online in the public cloud within a few minutes -- If I had to guess, its possible the huddle you were in had some kind of capacity issue or other fault that prevented immediate provisioning. If you ever boot a server and its not online in <5 minutes, I'd go straight to support chat, and they generally can tell you what is going on.
It sounds like you're not a fan of Rackspace (and that's fine) but you can't honestly believe that an API sends an email to a tech. That's just completely false statement that no one in there right mind should believe.
1. Contracts. They want 1 years minimum contracts for any dedicated servers. For truly gargantuan orders I could understand this but for one puny server? Never.
2. Their definition of "cloud" is different from mine. To use their "cloud" services your servers need to be public facing, ie on public IPs. Want them on your own VPN? You can stil get the cloud prices but not the API. you create and cancel servers via tickets. This is different from VPS how?
3. Sloooow provisioning - even if you are able to use their "public cloud" API to provision a server - prepare to wait hours for it to be done, leading me to suspect it does nothing more than email a tech to provision a VPS and hook it up somehow. Oh, you can't pause them to save money either, again making me think these "cloud" servers are nothing more than slicehosts with an extra layer of abstraction
Is that enough? I could go on.