Last night at around 4 AM, while I was sleeping soundly, my phone rang. Since I use my iPhone as an alarm, I have the speaker volume turned all the way up at night. Usually if my phone rang at 4 AM, I’d be pretty upset. I might even say some pretty nasty things to whoever was on the other end of the line, unless it was a life or death situation.

So why was I happy to get a call last night at 4 AM? Well, it seems when I was working on one of our servers last night I made a change (deleted some directories) that I shouldn’t have done. When the log rotation script ran it’s weekly cron job, Apache didn’t start back up.

Rackspace monitors all the major ports on our server, and in the event that one of them is down they not only assign a technician to it immediately, but they also follow whatever protocol we ask. I asked them to call my office and then cell numbers (in that order) to let me know the server was down.

So Rackspace called me at 4 AM to let me know that they noticed the server went offline and that they were working on it. Then they entered a trouble ticket and updated it 5 minutes later when the issue was resolved and the server was back up and running smoothly.

Rackspace touts “fanatical support” and I’ve found that to be true on a number of occasions. It could have easily been this morning before we noticed the site was down (or longer, since it’s a weekend it could’ve been a whole day). We could’ve lost thousands and thousands of visitors to that client’s website, but we didn’t because Rackspace took care of it.

So when the phone rang at 4 o’clock this morning I was only upset until I found out what it was… then I was relieved. I sleep better at night knowing I don’t have to worry — if something goes wrong I know my phone will ring and someone will already be working on the problem.