i have the opposite experience with Rackspace. The low end stuff (hosted exchange etc) is basically useless, people who are obviously on multiple chats, they let tickets sit for days...
Even when we had small handful of physical servers with them, they seemed inept. They actually lost our servers one time and couldn’t get someone out to reset power on our firewall.
My experiences were all with their "dedicated" or "managed" cloud services. Although I did notice that their marketing seemed to shift in the last months I was working with them for that employer from "let us help you build things on Rackspace" to "let us help you move what you built on Rackspace to AWS"
Yes, the Public Cloud, which houses most of the smaller Managed Infrastructure accounts (minimal support) is one of the bigger ... I believe the polite word is "opportunities?" It's a very pretty UI on top of a somewhat fragile Open Stack deployment, which needs a significant amount of work to patch around noisy infrastructure problems. That turns into a support floor burden, and it shows in ticket latency. Critiques directed at that particular product suite are, frankly, quite valid. I think Rackspace tried to compete with AWS, realized very quickly that they do not have Amazon's ability to rapidly scale, and very nearly collapsed under their own weight.
That said, our FAWS team are a good bunch, and what AWS lacks in support they more than make up for in well engineered, stable infrastructure. Since Rackspace's whole focus is support, I think the pairing works well on paper and it should scale effectively, but we'll have to see how it plays out in practice.
This is a big push, internally and externally. I don't know too much about the details (I don't work directly with that team) but it's been one of our bigger talking points for a while now.
Even when we had small handful of physical servers with them, they seemed inept. They actually lost our servers one time and couldn’t get someone out to reset power on our firewall.