Rackspace files an IPO, setting price by auction | Hacker News Reader

Rackspace files an IPO, setting price by auction

techcrunch.com

10 pointsmarkbao10 comments

Rackspace, the large managed hosting company, has filed an IPO eight years after their original (and retracted) IPO in 2000. Like Google, they are setting their price by auction.

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So I'm looking around Rackspace's webpage (a little pokey, btw) to check out the prices. I don't see any. Now, as a rational person, I have two thoughts:

1. Well, there are a 1000 other hosting companies that aren't a pain-in-the-ass starting at step #1 (looking for prices), and

2. They are obviously ashamed of their prices anyway.

...which means that I'm going to look elsewhere.

But a quick google search shows that their dedicated servers are $500/month and up. Pure insanity. But, you know, they have "Fanatical support". What is that, anyway? What I want from my hosting company is, you know, a minimum of hardware failures. I'm not sure what support you could have besides that. Backups? Backups are pure monkey work. I value it at minimum wage.

I'm guessing their (retarded) rationale for not showing prices is that then you'll be "forced" to contact their sales department to know more and then you'll "have" to rent a server so that you didn't "waste" their time...

Also, their configurations are "managed"... My totally uninformed guess is that you basically can't do squat without contacting them so that's why you need Fanatical Support (tm), and if you want to do something "non-standard" it will be hard and costly because it won't fit well into their architecture.

I hope someone can come shed some light on how totally off the track everything I just said is.

PS: The guy on their main page is fucking scary!

As the old saying goes, if they don't show the price, and you have to ask for it, then they are too expensive for you.

Well, if they're gunning for an IPO, you know they have quality hosting. They've been around for a while, survived the 2001 bubble, and they host 37signals and a ton of other websites.

I won't be a walking ad for them, but they reportedly have some kind of management structure that lets them handle support well. shrug

Maybe they are just trying to cash out. With cloud computing entering mainstream, and Amazon, Microsoft, Google and probably Sun start investing a lot of money, the space will be very competitive and capital intensive.

I don't think it will be a great stock to have. The margins will only keep shrinking.

It's amusing that you believe that a top five (probably #2) hosting provider that has had a competent cloud computing initiative for years (Mosso) is threatened by cloud computing entering the mainstream. I'm not saying hosting isn't going to get more competitive...I know that it is. But RackSpace has always managed to be among the fastest growing, most reliable, and highest margin, hosting providers in the industry.

I think you underestimate the growth that will continue to happen in hosting for the foreseeable future, and the strength of RackSpace in that industry. Most of our customers (who are hosting providers) view RackSpace as a very serious competitor to be taken seriously on nearly every front. And I'm not saying nice things about RackSpace just because we'd like to sell them some software. They really have built an impressive business.

A previous employer recently migrated their infrastructure off of Rackspace. I'm not quite sure of the price but it was in the ridiculous range and we kept having odd issues with the infrastructure (the network was setup oddly so that we got something like 10Mbps between the application servers and the DB server). We kept having really odd problems and poor performance.

It seems they have plenty of satisfied customers but I would personally never do business with them.

(from another board, this was posted by me about a year or so ago there)

(disclaimer: my company offers colocation, but I also do syadmin work for customers that use a specific web application server that I am expert at setting up)

My experience with RS stems from a customer that felt he needed very high burst bandwidth availability, and proceeded to get a Cisco firewall, 2 Opteron servers and a certain amount of transfer from them.

The time period was from about October or November 2005 thru to now, he is still a customer

Good points: a) they have a decent trouble-ticketing system b) they have Cisco guys and Linux guys on-staff c) they have monitoring in place d) you can call them up

Bad points a) bad HW: one of the Opteron servers kept rebooting under load. It would work fine until we unzipped some multi-GB files. It took RS a few days to get in the parts to replace it, and obviously, they did not do heavy-duty testing of the system before it went into production - I feel like 15 minutes with memtest86 would have caught it

b) bad HW: a drive failed, became read-only somehow, they rebooted, fsck'ed it and said it needed to be replaced, of course. problem: they wanted to charge extra to image or transfer all the data from the old drive to the new drive.

My take: they should do it for free, it is part of hardware maintenance - they wanted to leave it mounted as the secondary and then we were to move it over; alternatively, they could have offered to back it all up for us to the network backup, but they didn't.

c) lock-in pricing practices: they want to charge A LOT of money when you want to upgrade some hardware. They figure it is easier for you to spend more, than to change all your IPs and switch to some other provider

d) revenue enhancement: they want to sell you other services and push you to buy them. Any problem other than a basic one, is an excuse for them to suggest either a hardware upgrade or something else they will sell you.

e) if it ain't LAMP (linux/apache/mysql/php), the techs will not have much of a clue. Part of the service I set up involved a different web server running on port 80 (needed for the web app server I mention), not Apache. The tech wasn't paying attention and reset things to use Apache.

These are all just my opinions, your mileage may vary , etc.

I know back when I worked at sconex.com we hosted are application at rackspace with our images at serverbeach. I'm not sure about prices but I know our CEO would not have let them rip us off. And for the most part we seem to have fairly good customer service.

Though I'm just the user interface designer so take that as you will.

(Future == Cloud computing) ? True

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