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Over 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apollo is a private equity firm, so they are most likely acquiring Rackspace because they see fat they can trim (read: laying people off, outsourcing labor, tax optimization) off a decently competitive company that they can possibly take public or sell in 5-10 years. It's not so much about competing with Amazon, Google, etc. or advancing the state of the technology as much as making a bet that the brand is currently…
(Disclaimer: former employee of Rackspace) That is exactly how I read it. While Rackspace has been doing pretty well, its just not growing as fast as its competition and Wall Street in concerned. It is a big shame though. Rackspace is one of the few Texas-born companies that managed to strike it big and still have a very egalitarian culture. They have a very interesting culture and I wish it was something that could…
I knew this was coming and have moved a lot of our stuff off in preparation. Partly because of the unknown but also partly because their support has diminished over the past 2 years.
I was kind of hoping Amazon would acquire them. I don't have much faith with the purchase being a PE firm. Time now to move the rest of our stuff off.
Nice. So in a few years, there will be one less competitor in this space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure? AWS was one of the most expensive ones, Rackspace was cheaper
Back in 2009/2010 when I was looking into it AWS was half the price for a roughly equivalent instance.
Rackspace has been looking for a buyer for a while. I suspect that their business is not in terribly good shape. They even started consulting on AWS deployments a while back: "Need some help moving your servers over to AWS? We're here to help!"
Rackspace has been looking for a buyer for a while. I suspect that their business is not in terribly good shape. They even started consulting on AWS deployments a while back: "Need some help moving your servers over to AWS? We're here to help!"
Re: "Business not in terribly good shape" - there are 4.3 Billion reasons to suggest otherwise. This isn't the type of business that gets purchased without a lot of due diligence, and, we're not really in much of a tech bubble right now - so I thinks it's reasonable to asses that the underlying revenue/profit of Rackspace was sufficient to justify the (impressive) valuation.
I believe the "not terribly good shape" is a measurement that's _relative_ to other competitors in the cloud infrastructure market.
Rackspace's yearly revenues ($2 billion) have gone nearly flat[1]. On the other hand, Amazon's AWS has seen so much growth[2] that they now pull more revenue per quarter ($2.5 billion) than Rackspace does for the entire year.
Back in the early 2000s -- before AWS hit the scene, Rackspace hosting was attracting customers with excellent datacenter uptime and "fanatical support"[3]. Those 2 factors are not meaningful enough to the cloud subscribers today which is why Rackspace tried various strategies such as promoting OpenStack (hey don't be locked into proprietary AWS!) and then eventually "consulting services" to help customers use AWS. Neither of those initiatives really moved the needle.
I'm currently a Rackspace customer spending $120 a year for them to host my email but customers like me are part of a dying source of revenue. (Everybody can use GMail for free!).
Rackspace is "mature" instead of being "hot growth" which often translates to "not doing too well".
[1]http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/rax/financials
[2]http://www.statista.com/statistics/250520/forecast-of-amazon...
[3]https://www.rackspace.com/en-us/dedicated-servers/promise
I 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…
Over 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.
what was the use case when they wanted you to have a load balancer for a single server..?