RIP.
SoftLayer has been growing substantially after the IBM acquisition. This space is pretty interesting.
Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
141–150 of 167 posts
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#142Over the past six months I've been battling with poor service from Rackspace, with hosts mysteriously dying and their agents are trying to upsell me (load balancers for a single server, for example). We're migrating away but this doesn't surprise me.
I want add that their UI is awful too. Errors and slowness and their imaging system is constantly failing. We're testing out vultr for cost, speed and simplicity.
I was at RAX back in the early cloud days. The console has a long and sordid history. I was under the impression they bought CloudKick just to get the team to build a better console. Somewhat surprised it's still bad; somewhat not.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#143Wonder what this means for mailgun. They have wonderful customer support.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#144> $32 per-share-offer represents a premium of 6 percent to Rackspace's Thursday closing price. Quite a fall from almost $80 in 2013. I was a satisfied Rackspace customer back around 2001 when I had a web hosting business, but it was truly a premium service - very expensive compared to competitors. We ended up going with our own bare metal eventually. Then, when everything moved to the cloud, Rackspace seemed a little…
ditto. customer in 2001-2003. Definitely 50% more than competitors back then for just a basic dedicated unix box. But founder and chief evangelist paid us a visit at our dinky little office in Manhattan, so that was a treat. :)
2011-2013 surely :-)
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
So where does Apollo Global sit on this spectrum of PE vulture turnaround ?
They own for-profit education companies like University of Phoenix. Read up on their history, especially the law suits, to get an idea of what the management's values are like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix
That's actually a different firm called Apollo Group (which is mostly comprised of Phoenix and a small number of other things) – Apollo Global is a much larger private equity firm with a confusingly similar name
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just went through this process with the Mandrill debacle earlier this year. I've found SendGrid to be on par with Mailgun (with a less wonky admin dashboard too). Both have comparable 10k~12k free sends per month. If you're using the SMTP gateway instead of direct API integration (which is the only way I'd do it these days, after dealing with a bunch of sites that were tied to Mandrill's API), then there's not really…
I just switched to running my software's email from my personal mail server when Mandrill died. Setting up your own mail server is a pain in the ass but it has paid off 100x imo.
I used to send emails from my own servers, with everything configured according to the best practices, as much as I could. This was for account management emails: things like verifying user accounts, resetting passwords, etc.
It seems my emails were getting into spam boxes or outright rejected over 50% of the time, which obviously was driving users away. Mails would sometimes be classified as spam on my own Gmail, even after telling it multiple times to not mark those emails as spam. So I switched to Mailgun, and things have been much more peaceful - sometimes emails take a while to arrive, but I don't remember the last time anyone said it was in spam. It was not about the email content, as the content didn't change...
What's your experience with this? I suppose some domains/TLDs and certain IP address ranges are more prone to be classified as spam than others, and that's why I prefer using an external service: hopefully these guys can control their infrastructure in ways I can't do with mine. But I'm also a supporter of Internet decentralization, and email is one of those things that in principle is easily decentralized...
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just switched to running my software's email from my personal mail server when Mandrill died. Setting up your own mail server is a pain in the ass but it has paid off 100x imo.
I used to send emails from my own servers, with everything configured according to the best practices, as much as I could. This was for account management emails: things like verifying user accounts, resetting passwords, etc. It seems my emails were getting into spam boxes or outright rejected over 50% of the time, which obviously was driving users away. Mails would sometimes be classified as spam on my own Gmail, ev…
It takes a lot of upfront work, but I haven't had to do much maintenance on it since the initial setup and my emails get delivered. You have to set up SPF and DKIM, appeal to the blocklists, and set up reverse DNS. Then you have to, you know, not spam people. I highly recommend mail-tester.com, you can send them an email and they'll tell you how to improve it. Here's my score: https://www.mail-tester.com/web-ghs5t5
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
They own for-profit education companies like University of Phoenix. Read up on their history, especially the law suits, to get an idea of what the management's values are like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix
Ugh, those guys. So... this is not good news for the customers of Rackspace.
Whoa, you're username, nice. Anyway, Apollo Global is different from Apollo Group.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to send emails from my own servers, with everything configured according to the best practices, as much as I could. This was for account management emails: things like verifying user accounts, resetting passwords, etc. It seems my emails were getting into spam boxes or outright rejected over 50% of the time, which obviously was driving users away. Mails would sometimes be classified as spam on my own Gmail, ev…
It takes a lot of upfront work, but I haven't had to do much maintenance on it since the initial setup and my emails get delivered. You have to set up SPF and DKIM, appeal to the blocklists, and set up reverse DNS. Then you have to, you know, not spam people. I highly recommend mail-tester.com, you can send them an email and they'll tell you how to improve it. Here's my score: https://www.mail-tester.com/web-ghs5t5
Thanks, I didn't know about mail-tester.com and similar tools. I am definitely not spamming people, and I had SPF, DKIM and reverse DNS set up, but I don't think I ever did the blocklists part. Something to keep in mind if my projects ever grow too big to fit in the free tiers of Mailgun and similar services.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#150I guess it was only a matter of time before they got bought out. It's tough to compete against one of Google, Amazon or Microsoft, competing against all 3 at the same time in an area that all three consider to be core to their future must just be cut throat! It's never great for a companies employee's to be taken over by a private equity firm, if you actually find someone whose had a good experience then please let m…
Off topic, but can you tell me more about the issue with being taken over by a private equity firm? I work for a 10k employee company who will be taken off stock exchange and sold to a Chinese equity firm.
A typical PE buys the company with 20% cash down, and 80% debt (i.e. money borrowed from a bank).
They now have to find extra profit to pay the interest. Ideally they also get a healthy dividend or management fee every year.
This inevitably comes down to a. increased sales b. cost (i.e. salary) cuts
They also want to resell/IPO the company in 3-7 years - obviously for money than they paid for it. This is another constant pressure to increase profit (see a & b above).
HOWEVER Growing companies are usually not for sale and are very expensive. They cant be bought by PE. PE often looks for a troubled company which can be bought on the cheap, and can be somehow be kept profitable for a few years.
Hence (a) is difficult leading to focus on (b)
This of course is not all bad. Some academic studies have shown that PE companies do grow over time. The new management can trim the middle management roles and invest more in real r&d and product. YMMV