After 20 years as a Rackspace customer (Slicehost before they were acquired by Rackspace) I had my first negative customer experience today, and it seems like something has changed.

I attempted to delete a Cloud Server, and got a dialog that I need to call support (like, on the phone, like a cave person) to delete a cloud server. I mean, isn’t the whole point of cloud that it’s on demand?

So, I call, and after 10 minutes on hold, I get a support person who demands that I justify deleting the server instance. And then tries to talk me out of it like this is 1993 and I’m canceling AOL.

I FINALLY convince him that I want to delete it, and he says it’s policy that I leave it running for another week to ensure that there’s no data going to/from it. I said, I’ve already done that, because I’m a responsible sysadmin. But that wasn’t good enough.

So I shutdown -h now the thing, and and he still insists that it needs to run for another week (which I would, of course, pay for) just idling, to prove that it’s idle.

Finally, he opens a ticket, and then tells me I have to comment on the ticket “Yes I agree” before he can then action that ticket, and finally deleted the server.

BUT THEN, I discover that I have a “Cloud Files” instance with backup files going back to 2013 which I’m paying for, and the only way to delete them is ONE AT A TIME via a web interface. I am not making this up. You can, in fact, “select all” in the interface, but since it only displays 100 files at a time, and there are tens of thousands of files, this is going to take me the rest of my life.

So … for whatever it’s worth, I’m a happy Hetzner customer now. But, of course, in order to delete my Rackspace account, I’m going to have to call them again …