Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options • Hacker News Board

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#61

Post by JohnTHaller » Fri, May 16, 2014, 3:07 PM UTC

dpcan wrote: post #39

imsofuture wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's odd. I think of 'live chat' as cheap-o support manned by folks who likely can't fix anything, since that's been my experience. To the point that I won't use something for production if that's all they offer. The cheap guys offer a live support linke, often offline, and call it 2/47 support. Well, if that, the very inexpensive guys offer web-based tickets only. No phone, email, or live chat.

Rackspace has folks that know how to fix a complicated issue on RHEL stack at 3am, which is nice. And, unlike a cheap host who has an SLA that guarantees 100% uptime but only refunds you for time lost, Rackspace's SLA incentivizes them to fix things ASAP. Things like a dedicated box having a hardware failure will be restored in an hour and they credit you 5% of your monthly fee for every hour over that. Or 5% for each 30 minutes of downtime due to data center issues (power, network, HVAC, etc). And they do make good on it.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#62

Post by imsofuture » Fri, May 16, 2014, 3:48 PM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #61

dpcan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's odd. I think of 'live chat' as cheap-o support manned by folks who likely can't fix anything, since that's been my experience. To the point that I won't use something for production if that's all they offer. The cheap guys offer a live support linke, often offline, and call it 2/47 support. Well, if that, the very inexpensive guys offer web-based tickets only. No phone, email, or live chat. Rackspace has folks t…

Chat support is extremely helpful when it comes to minor issues. Sure, if there's a core networking issue in the datacenter that's strangely impacting my servers I want to be on the phone with a well-informed tech.

Rackers are a smart bunch, their first-level chat support is great for the million minor issues I need solved. ("We've got a noisy neighbor, can you check it out?", "Can you move this VM to a new host?", etc.)

That's 10 seconds of divided attention required from me vs 10 minutes of dedicated attention for a phone call.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#63

Post by badamson » Fri, May 16, 2014, 5:17 PM UTC

rurounijones wrote: post #49

badamson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're fine financially. >$300M Cash, $70M of debt (most of which are capital leases). They say they've been approached by "multiple parties" so it's just a matter of trying to get the best offer. http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1107694/0001107694140...

Ok, so assume I am an idiot on this (not far wrong). Why is their stock price not high? Just because they are not satisfying shareholders / wall street analysts? Are the slowly losing customers or see somethign in the future that will cause trouble?

This sums it up nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753787.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#64

Post by toomuchtodo » Fri, May 16, 2014, 6:07 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #36

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.

* Store your application/source code/etc in multiple object stores (S3/Rackspace Cloud files)

* Abstract away from specific computing/storage APIs

* Test to ensure you can always deploy to a different provider

Twilio does this well, as they run in AWS and Rackspace Cloud, based on availability and cost.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#65

Post by rurounijones » Fri, May 16, 2014, 6:09 PM UTC

badamson wrote: post #63

rurounijones wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so assume I am an idiot on this (not far wrong). Why is their stock price not high? Just because they are not satisfying shareholders / wall street analysts? Are the slowly losing customers or see somethign in the future that will cause trouble?

This sums it up nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753787 .

Thanks, that does.

Re: Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

#66

Post by JohnTHaller » Fri, May 16, 2014, 6:39 PM UTC

akurilin wrote: post #40

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?

I know Rackspace does fully managed dedicated servers at a much lower pricepoint. SoftLayer charges $299 for managed on top of what you already pay and you must be billing at least $2500 a month to get that. Plus you need to add a dedicated firewall at $1,998 a month in order to be eligible for managed. (Source: I just spoke with a SoftLayer sales agent via live chat as I was looking into them for hosting.)