I'll second that. Rackspace ain't no $20/month, but as with most things, you get what you pay for.
The only recent downtime was an instance a few months back where I fat-fingered an iptables config. A tech was on the pulling up the console and cleaning up my mess while I was still typing out a support ticket.
Third that as an ex-MTer currently on Slicehost/Mosso. I've personally had sub-five minute resolution times with Slicehost support. If you're reading this, fantastic jobs guys.
Rackspace is on the very high end of the cost spectrum, and the service really isn't that great. But at least their servers are fast and real, if you/your organization doesn't care about the budget, they're probably as good a choice as any as far as quality of infrastructure goes.
Just make sure the person signing the hosting contract actually reads it, also. You might be surprised to find what they try to bury in there.
It's worth noting that they bought out their lower-priced competition at ServerBeach.
Not sure what/who you consider "great" then. Rackspace has been stellar for us–always available on the phone; answering tickets fast; alerting me when there are problems.
I've never had a bad cs experience with Rackspace. (I've got 6 servers with them)
Their technicians once left 2 active network interfaces down for 45 minutes on one of our servers when upgrading something and didn't fix it until we called them.
When I was researching server space 2.5 years ago price wasn't an object (ahh, remember those days?).
Anyway, I've never had any reason to complain about Rackspace service. Now, I'm not saying the service is a good value (you definitely pay a premium), but it's been solid for me.
This has been compounded by the outage earlier this week too on the same cluster!