Rackspace announces it has laid off 200 workers

A well behaved remote mail server should either reject/bounce the message, or deliver it to a user's spam folder, it should never just drop it. Unfortunately, It's near impossible to determine if your message ended up in a user's spam folder :(

My server sends 50-100 messages a month, tops, and I never send mass messages, just direct messages to family, friends & customers. The biggest issue I had was when Rackspace periodically (+ voluntarily) reported their VPS IP space to Spamhaus, which required me to inform Spamhaus that I was responsible for that specific IP, and it should not be on the blacklist.

Corporate email admins can also be opinionated about email senders because their email system is only for their employees' work, specifically. They are less likely than Gmail to care about email from the little guys who are trying to build an audience or business. They definitely don't see it as their job to provide startups and random people with access to the inboxes of their staff. They will err on the side of saying no to unfamiliar email.

Corporate email is where it gets hard. You can have a clean IP, all the authentication options configured correctly, and still struggle to get out of the spam folder. This is one reason businesses will pay for big-name email platforms, which have spent a lot of time and money building good reputations with corporate teams, and have people who specialize in maintaining those reputations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers behind RBLMon.

DO's equivalent Elastic IP product can't be used to originate email, unfortunately. They actively block it, and it's against their ToS (Last time I looked). Otherwise I would have preferred to host it there. If you allocate a Droplet, groom it's IP, and then terminate it (either for yours or their reasons), they only "promise" to give you back the same IP, and I'd hate to have to setup a new IP in a rush.

I could make a call and be instantly connected to a Linux tech that was often a better sysadmin than anyone we had on staff, which was why we really encouraged clients to pay the premium for their service. The choices then were a) host cheap and pay $150-200K in sysadmin salaries to keep it going while passing on these costs to clients or b) host at RS and use their economy of scale. Easy decision.

Then they got bought by Apollo and I hoped what I"d seen happen with other companies bought by private equity wouldn't happen. The PE model only gives a shit about profit, which is at odds with a service focus. Rather than seeing profits as the by product of a good model, excellent service, and loyal customers, profits become the measuring stick by which operational costs are measured.

So that Linux tech that cost $120K+ per year gets binned and replaced with two juniors who cost less but together are unable to accomplish in thrice the time what the binned guy could do. Hold times start to creep up because shit isn't getting fixed. So they hire more juniors who still can't get things done quickly.

Guys like me put up with this for a brief time and then bail because the pricing can no longer be justified.

I'm sure it's true that the bulk of their cost is support, but it's not fanatical anymore because the folks that really were so have been gone for years.

Except we hadn't completed ours yet, this event was planned for several months due to leadership expecting double-digit turnover after the performance review period, about 10% of leadership in a single product got wind of it coming and has already settled in at new companies, multiple principals and architects with spotless records were let go from a single product along with nearly 80% of its other headcount, and layoffs have been quietly happening without attention being drawn (a few a week). We were also told at an Open Book that Apollo had to intervene for Rackspace to afford contracted bonus structure this year, as Rackspace literally did not have cash on hand to meet targets.

Other than all that, though, astute insight and analysis. You're right, just typical fiscal year slog. (PR is literally saying "we're a stable company, promise" in statements.)

If everyone just charged some basic $ for support, it would generally get better. I'm perplexed and sometimes shocked how much 'free support' people expect - and often "get" to some degree - by cheap hosts. I'm in some WP support forums on facebook and... man - what people expect for $10/month is crazy. And... the amount of bs misinformation and half-truths being spread by 'experts' in those forums in crazy too.

Add in 'authoritative' sites and experts 'recommending' (via affiliate links) bluehost/godaddy/siteground on a recurring basis, and we've got this... again(?) - race to the bottom?

People will post how 'awesome' the support is because some remote people spent 15 minutes walking them through file permission setup amazes me.

Oh... and "free migrations" between hosts. Then when there's a real issue - like 6 of the 38 plugins don't actually work on the new host, and the new host says "this will be $75 to make it all work" people are outraged! and publicly slam everywhere they can. Then someone else promises unlimited XYZ, they move, and the cycle starts again.

Finally... liar/cheats/scumbags who intentionally rip people off on top of all that (I think some of the ripping off isn't always intentional, just misinformed) makes people even more wary of trusting genuine people.

I may have just described half of the history of human society, unrelated to hosting, but.... I've watch this market grow over the past 20+ years, and it's just so... weird.

"Average Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) of the first 3 full months' paid invoice"

And what someone like Linode pays:

"You then receive a $20.00 credit applied to your account"

The comment you're replying to is saying Rackspace gets some benefit from unethical agencies advising clients that don't need a dedicated server to get one anyway.

It wasn't a knock on Rackspace per se, more of a commentary on agencies.

The parent comment makes a valid point about performance-to-price value. DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr currently offer much more value for the newbie client (and for many other types of customers) than Rackspace does at the same price point.

Cloud architects are hard to come by, and hard to pry away from their existing jobs.

Think about whether or not your want to pay Accenture marketing rates to get a junior employee who just started, because knowing what I know about the pay scale, if anybody gets some expertise in Cloud Architecture and has some contacts in tech, which is quite likely because he's talking to clients, he's probably going to jump ship for a company that pays better.

For example, this is not my first job out of college. I had to sit through a 2 hour meeting where a HR drone went ON and ON about tradeoffs of one health plan over another based on your life situation. Me, having basic reading comprehension, was on my laptop. I was reprimanded for that.

For years, Rackspace provided amazing sysadmin support, but there was always a gap between where their support ended, and the best practices for WP and Drupal sites began. That included tuning the LAMP stack for those applications, configuring dev sites and deployment processes, and managing caching and TLS. Rackspace helped with general advice, but we had to "do" it, and maintain it.

That's not true on CMS-specific hosting like WP Engine and Pantheon; it's all in one package: production hosting with scaling, dev and staging sites with one-click sync and deployments, CDN, TLS certs via Let's Encrypt, and support. We went from spending almost an FTE's worth of time on sysadmin and dev ops, to almost no time on those things.

I'd say I wish we had done it earlier, but in my opinion, we could not have. It has only been within the last year or two that these services have really put together the full feature set we wanted.

Their infrastructure feels like using a couple of half disassembled servers on the floor. Their platform is fragmented to pieces, they have no idea what a "design system" is, and you have to log into like three different webapps to just play around with your server.

They are literally in the same place they were in on day one, playform wise.

If you're nostalgic for some 2006 era hosting company, go with InMotion.

Back then Invotion/HDC was kind of shitshow, so I left and spent a couple years at Rackspace...

I'm not sure there's any place you can get that sort of service now, which is part of the reason I run my own servers and dug more in to sysadmin stuff. Yes, my stuff's in a remote data center, and I can't physically touch it. Assuming there's a dumb pipe coming in, I can handle everything else (or find someone who can) - I don't need handholding service bundled in to a price.