/src/site_source/_posts/2013-09-06-fanatical-support-from-the-rackspace-community.markdown

---
layout: post
title: "Fanatical Support from the Rackspace Community"
date: 2013-09-06 08:20
comments: true
author: Evan Ochs
published: true
categories: 
- Community
---
Earlier this year Rackspace announced [Rackspace Developer Support](http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-developer-support-fanatical-support-for-your-code/), an exciting new service to provide "Fanatical Support For Your Code".  

As a Fanatical Support Manager, this presented some new and fun challenges to prepare our Support Rackers to provide a level of service that we could be proud to call Fanatical.  We designed a training and assessment program for our Rackers to gain the skills and certification needed to properly support our customers.  In addition to ensuring our front line support had everything they needed to give advice on using our SDK's, we also had to investigate new ways to provide that support.  Support tickets, chat sessions, and phone support are always available to our customers for all of their Rackspace needs, but the most exciting and successful medium has been our [Community Developer Forums](https://community.rackspace.com/developers/default).<!-- more -->

Launched in February of this year, the Rackspace Community has given our customers a place to receive speedy answers to their questions from Rackers and customers, participate in discussions around our products (and sometimes some very off topic discussions), and a [knowledge base](http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/) of previously answered questions to search through. The ability to provide quick and Fanatical Support on a one-to-many basis is a big win for both Rackspace and our customers.  We pride ourselves on our fast responses to our discussion threads, and even have a [team](https://community.rackspace.com/general/f/34/t/957) of Rackers that are dedicated to making sure we don't let posts and threads become stale.  The "Community Elite" team is comprised of Rackers from all over the company, from support, account management, leadership, and DevOps code support.  Often we have the answer to a question somewhere within the collective knowledge of these 30 or so individuals, but if not, we use our vast network of relationships within the company to provide the correct answer.

The Community is an ideal tool to support custom code that uses our SDKs.  Having the ability to post code snippets (or links to a gist of code) and error messages is invaluable when it comes to code support.  We have many examples of developers using the Community to get advice and help on PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Java, and Chef.  We've even started to do AMA's (Ask me anything) with some of our SDK developers that you can check out [here](http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/got-python-questions.html), and [here](https://community.rackspace.com/developers/f/7/t/890) is an example of the type of DevOps support we can provide our customers.

A longtime Rackspace customer, [Mario Giambanco](http://giamban.co/) was looking for a way to sell a digital product for one of his clients.  The 4000+ products were hosted in Cloud Files CDN infrastructure, but giving out those CDN links (or putting them in his source code) would allow anyone to download them for free, something his client would not have been too pleased about.  Mario identified the temporary URL feature of our CDN as a good option for his case, which allows for a time-based expiring URL to be created for an object.  This allows him to display the product briefly on the site without presenting the true CDN link in the source code.  Mario ran into a little difficulty with the feature, but by working together on building and testing PHP code we were able to provide him with a working code snippet for him to use.  Since that [thread](https://community.rackspace.com/developers/f/7/t/890), Mario has worked with us a few more times and has become an active member of the Rackspace Community.  

Mario had this to say about his experience with Community based Developer Support:  

>"In 2003, a friend and I built a SaaS HR website to ease the process of employee reviews for major corporations. We chose Rackspace managed hosting for our provider. One night, I was notified via email by Rackspace that the server went down, that Rackspace fixed the problem, and that Rackspace would monitor the server for the next couple hours to make sure everything was ok. That was at 4am on a weekday. Fast forward to 2013 and my host of choice is still Rackspace. The developer forums are full of people like Evan who go out of their way to help you at all hours of the night, with messages that end in "sent from my iPhone" at 10pm EDT and out of the box thinking with ideas such as Geo-Redundancy for failing over CDN containers. Fanatical support is when people care about your problems and go out of their way to help you, and that's exactly what I get from Rackspace. I've come to expect nothing less."

If you are a developer looking for some assistance with our SDK's, or just have some really cool tips and tricks that would help other Rackspace customers in developing against our API, come visit us in the [Rackspace Community](https://community.rackspace.com/)!  Who knows, you might even [get a t-shirt for stopping by](https://community.rackspace.com/general/f/34/t/517). :) 

My name on the forums is [FanaticalEvan](https://community.rackspace.com/members/evan.ochs/default), I hope to see you there!