Why I Love Rackspace
By Brad on August 19th, 2010
We own a managed dedicated server with Rackspace, and on August 14th 2010 the server suffered a kernel panic. The server was unresponsive and more than 100 websites went down. How do I know this? Not because I happened to be working on the server at the time, or because one of our clients filed a complaint, but rather because the following ticket was created on our account within just a few minutes of the crash:
Hello,
Your server came up in our monitoring service today as not responding to ping attempts. At console, we found that the server had frozen with a kernel panic. The code of the kernel panic was: “Fatal exception”.
Your server was power-cycled and is now back online.
If you have absolutely any questions or concerns, feel free to update this ticket or call Team M6 any time. We’re glad to do what we can to help in any way possible. Thank you again for choosing Rackspace!
Keith M.
DataCenter Operations
Rackspace Hosting
Thanks Keith! But Keith isn’t actually part of our support team. He just helped bring the server back online. So why did the server crash and what would prevent this from happening again? An hour later, a Rackspace engineer on our support team was looking further into the issue and updated the ticket with the following:
Hello,
I was not able to determine what caused the failure on your server. I do not see signs of a hardware failure so it looks like this may have been a resource contention issue that happened very quickly which is why there is not a lot of information in the logs. I have installed the Rackspace System Monitor (rs-sysmon) which is a lightweight script that takes system resource usage snapshots every 5 minutes. Should this problem reoccur, rs-sysmon should provide valuable troubleshooting data.
Currently your server is running normally and the alert has cleared. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.
Thank you,
Matt C.
Team M12 - Linux System Administrator
To be clear, this had nothing to do with the Rackspace data centre, though their infrastructure has had it’s own issues over the past year. Instead, the issue was specific to our server, and Rackspace dealt with it before we (or our clients) even knew there was a problem.
This is why we chose Rackspace as our web host in the first place. We know that most businesses are under-serviced with regards to their website and online marketing, so as a creative agency we knew we had to align with a web host that shares our commitment to quality customer service. Or, as Rackspace likes to call it, Fanatical Support™.
Sometimes I question why we’re paying Rackspace the big bucks to manage our server, and wonder if there are cheaper alternatives. Situations like this remind me that as a small team, we need to focus on what we’re good at and leave the rest to the experts.
