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The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

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Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#101

Post by seabird »

kaashif wrote: post #32
ferdek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I misremembered something and cannot find a source now, but I think there was some way to avoid paying tax on short sales when company goes bankrupt and gets delisted. EDIT: See sibling comment. EDIT 2: Am I reading this right? almost 1,800,000 shares failed to deliver just in one day of Sep 22nd? [0] [0] https://fintel.io/ss/us/rxt

If the company actually goes bankrupt and their stock is delisted from exchanges, covering your position becomes much harder since liquidity is greatly reduced. I think the ideal scenario for a short seller is if the stock loses 99%, stays listed, they cover, then it gets delisted. I might have that wrong though.

You have that wrong; bankruptcy is the ideal scenario for somebody with a short position. The brokerage writes it off. The shares are worthless, so why go after somebody for owing you $0?

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#102

Post by bravetraveler »

rrdharan wrote: post #78
brightball wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with a company back in 2007-08 who was using Rackspace. I'll never forget the day I was sitting at a command prompt looking at htop trying to figure out what was straining the server so much...when I got a message in the terminal from Rackspace telling me exactly what was happening and what we needed to change to fix it. Support person just chatting with me right there in the terminal, without me even having to…

That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.

Managed services, managed access

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#103

Post by gmiller123456 »

SteveNuts wrote: post #26
koolba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be tax free? Until the position is closed out it'd be an unrealized gain but there's nothing special about shorting. Gains are not taxed until they're actually realized by closing out the position.

By leaving the position open forever and taking a loan against the security.

    By leaving the position open forever and taking a loan against the security.
Where would they get the money to pay installments on the loan? What you're claiming is really just shuffling around which dollar gets taxed.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#104

Post by acdha »

rrdharan wrote: post #78
brightball wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with a company back in 2007-08 who was using Rackspace. I'll never forget the day I was sitting at a command prompt looking at htop trying to figure out what was straining the server so much...when I got a message in the terminal from Rackspace telling me exactly what was happening and what we needed to change to fix it. Support person just chatting with me right there in the terminal, without me even having to…

That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.

One thing to remember is that norms changed over time. In the 90s and 2000s it was pretty widely accepted that a sysadmin could access customer data pretty easily and that trust was basically factored into the relationship. Over time and various scandals our expectations have changed but there's definitely a generational divide here.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#105

Post by Nifty3929 »

a5seo wrote: post #60

I used Rackspace back in 2001-2002. Made the switch after hosting my JSP web app on servlets.net and experiencing an extended outage with no support. The difference in support was nothing short of miraculous. I’m inclined to think Apollo failed to understand the investments necessary to make such a business work, and figured they could squeeze costs out of the business without losing value. Funny how these finance ty…

Actually I think the financial types correctly identified that Rackspace's days of growth were over, and what remained is to allow it to wind down over a couple of decades, getting what profit they could along the way. There's no point investing in something who's days are numbered, so they didn't. They cut costs and jacked up the bottom line. They probably didn't want or plan for anything major like losing emails, but they probably did anticipate a degradation in quality of service and gradual customer attrition.

I'm not sure this is good or bad necessarily - it's just part of a business cycle.

It should be a wake-up call for folks that continuing to do business with a company that is no longer interested in growing and increasing top-line is risky. Companies trying to grow top-line will be very interested in over-delivering and keeping customers happy even if they lose on short-term bottom-line. The opposite is also true.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#107

Post by sooperserieous »

chunk_waffle wrote: post #90

Used Rackspace heavily around 2012ish to 2015ish but eventually migrated most of out stuff to AWS. As of 2020ish or so we had a handful of VMs we'd not migrated yet and were migrating them one at a time. Whenever we completed the migration, and wanted to delete the VM we were forced to make a phone call to a real person, who would try to talk us out of deleting the VM! We were prevented from doing it from the console…

I ran in to this Sunday removing my last VM from their cloud. I've used CLI/Ansible/etc to manage these forever but this time I was in the web console making sure very last byte was gone. Notably the APIs don't have any of these restrictions which is why I hadn't noticed earlier. "openstack --os-cloud rax server delete webfarm03" did the trick...

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#108

Post by sickmate »

hzbxks wrote: post #38
sickmate wrote: post #5

>Highly trained people handled the company’s incoming telephone and online inquiries Not sure I can agree with this. Almost a decade ago we had some shared hosting accounts at Rackspace for some very legacy clients (ones that even accounting had forgotten about and not billed them for years). We had an issue with accessing one of the databases to export for handover, and so I got in touch with their online support. T…

rackspace never had a "shared hosting" product outside of a very short lived acquisition of mosso from like 2007-2008....

It might have been called something else like cloud hosting, but it was definitely equivalent to a shared hosting model. We didn't manage the web servers, no root access etc and the database server was shared between 300+ of their customers.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#109

Post by sooperserieous »

webmobdev wrote: post #58
mutant wrote: post #4

Former customer here, when I migrated off of Rackspace in July, they couldn't manage much of the infrastructure, firewalls, switches and netapps were all managed by scripts, automations, and clueless engineers. I don't blamw the engineers, I blame management

That's one of the first lessons old schoolers learnt about web hosting when the internet boom began and busted - The oldest web hosts are the most reliable, but always keep an eye for change of ownership. Rackspace, Pair, Slicehost, Linode etc. were some of the really popular and good ones in the small and medium segment (Rackspace, ofcourse targeted enterprises) during this era but now ALL of them have been bought b…

I went with Slicehost to Rax (as a customer) in that acquisition, overall it was as good as could be expected. Since Akamai isn't a PE firm (I think? :) there is hope for Linode

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#110

Post by swozey »

Hippocrates wrote: post #50

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. 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 bu…

I used to be one of those phone answering sysadmins for a specific customer revenue. I think that job gave me phone anxiety. Every single different call was some new destroyed system by someone who had no idea what they were doing, hacked systems, unplanned migrations, whiteboarding-in-your-brain architecture discussions, etc. The other webhosts I worked at would never put an admin on the phone with a customer directly unless they were seriously enterprise, like a portion of the datacenter.

One time the CTO of a major company called me directly and I had to migrate a SQL database that was the backend of their public website while having him breathe down my neck. Lots of calls like that.

We gave great support but at cost. That was tiring and we did it in shifts. I hated the days I had to do that.

FWIW for people with different support experiences, support was based on revenue. The different tiers (smb/enterprise, etc) assigned you more senior admins, etc. It wasn't a massive pool of admins or anything.

I quit eventually because I hated answering the phones. Great company while I was there, though. I recommended it to everyone who could deal with the phone calls and San Antonio.

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