The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’
My company used Rackspace back in 2013. It was my first gig where I was "managing servers" and "deploying to production". The rest of the team was as inexperienced as I was.<p>We paid extra for the support services that entitled us to unlimited 24/7 human support. Whenever I was stuck on an issue with deploying, scaling, crashing etc. my boss would say "try calling support." Initially you'd get a first-line operator but I learned quickly to "escalate to a sysadmin".<p>The sysadmin was eager to help and would log into your VPS and do anything you'd ask, plus advise and implement on stuff they thought you'd need! Debug your running app and code? Sure. Fix broken packages or get something to compile? Of course. Custom scaling and deployment scripts in bash? Gladly. Some reps were more helpful than others and I got to know them on a first-name basis.<p>In hindsight it seems totally absurd to have a phone support running bash on our VPS but it was super helpful at the time. I learned a lot and they saved my bacon a few times. I can only imagine the liability issues.