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Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

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Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#31

Post by programminggeek »

If your whole business relies on staying in step with giant competitors with huge piles of money thrown off from other successful ventures to lower their costs and prices more aggressively then you can, it's going to be an ugly business in the long haul.

Price is a terrible competitive advantage because unless you have a revolutionary cost structure to go with it, you're hosed once someone does something reckless, like lowering below cost to drive you out of business.

Google and Amazon aren't going anywhere because they own search and ecommerce. Hosting and infrastructure are nice businesses for both companies, but they are fine without it. Rackspace without hosting and infrastructure revenue is not a company.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#32

Post by FireBeyond »

rhizome wrote: post #15
yuhong wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would be a good acquirer.

GoDaddy probably has the cash.

Please, no. Just, no.

We have 80+ servers with Rackspace. Would go to AWS before enduring a GoDaddy-owned Rackspace, on general principles.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#33

Post by FireBeyond »

imsofuture wrote: post #28
JohnTHaller wrote: post #12

Rackspace's real strength is in their managed services. Either with a managed dedicated server or managed cloud account. The level of support and assistance you get is something that isn't even available from Amazon, Google, etc. It seems, however, that Rackspace is feeling the pressure from both large and small players and some businesses go with Amazon, Google, etc and do all the OS and stack management in house wh…

Rackspace has been dropping the ball on support, big time , over the past 6-12 months. I'm not sure what's changed, but it's not for the better.

I'd have to agree... we have tickets that go days without response, for things like requesting an increase in server quota (nothing ridiculous - like the ability to spin up an additional 6 servers / 96GB RAM - when we are a long term customer who spends five digits a month with them).

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#34

Post by dangrossman »

127001brewer wrote: post #3
bruceb wrote: post #2

Contemplating moving from RS to Linode. Anyone done the same? Was it worth it for the savings?

For myself, I greatly appreciate having a service like Mailgun available to Rackspace customers - does Linode (or another company) have a similar e-mail service?

If you're using it for outbound mail, you might look at using Mandrill. They're much bigger -- it's MailChimp's backend, used by 5M companies. That means mail is their primary business, their ISP relationships are solid and you can count on them to have 24/7 staff if anything does go wrong. They're also quite competitive: 12K free e-mails per month, then cheaper than both Mailgun and Sendgrid.

http://www.mandrill.com/

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#36

Post by dredmorbius »

smacktoward wrote: post #10

Aaargh. I love Rackspace. I was looking forward to being a happy Rackspace customer until I was old and gray. And all the things I love about them would be the first things to go after an acquisition. Aaaaaaaaaargh.

Which speaks to another risk of cloud computing: business continuity of your cloud provider.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#38

Post by imsofuture »

dpcan wrote: post #30
imsofuture wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rackspace has been dropping the ball on support, big time , over the past 6-12 months. I'm not sure what's changed, but it's not for the better.

My experience has been the opposite. Live Chat help seems to fix just about every single problem we have on the fly, and they open Tickets when it gets more complicated, with thorough and fast follow-up. I have never been happier with my hosting support, and I've used company after company over the years. I've now been with Rackspace (Sites and Cloud Servers specifically) the longest. I should note that I ended up wi…

No joke, they took away our ability to use chat support a few months ago.

Why? Because we're such an important client, that they want us to have a more personal relationship, by forcing us to interact over the phone. I wish I were kidding.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#39

Post by dpcan »

imsofuture wrote: post #38
dpcan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has been the opposite. Live Chat help seems to fix just about every single problem we have on the fly, and they open Tickets when it gets more complicated, with thorough and fast follow-up. I have never been happier with my hosting support, and I've used company after company over the years. I've now been with Rackspace (Sites and Cloud Servers specifically) the longest. I should note that I ended up wi…

No joke, they took away our ability to use chat support a few months ago. Why? Because we're such an important client, that they want us to have a more personal relationship, by forcing us to interact over the phone. I wish I were kidding.

This freaks me out. Live Chat is my life-blood, especially given my schedule and number of clients. Particularly regarding issues with my Sites customers.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#40

Post by akurilin »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #12

Rackspace's real strength is in their managed services. Either with a managed dedicated server or managed cloud account. The level of support and assistance you get is something that isn't even available from Amazon, Google, etc. It seems, however, that Rackspace is feeling the pressure from both large and small players and some businesses go with Amazon, Google, etc and do all the OS and stack management in house wh…

Comparison with SoftLayer re: dedicated servers?
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