Rackspace acquire Slicehost
slicehost.com
slicehost.com
PickledOnion's posts on the Slicehost articles page were top notch. I hope the quality continues.
It got to the point that I'd only recommend Slicehost, after a few bad experiences with media temple and the like.
DON'T FUCK IT UP, RACKSPACE.
I'm also disturbed that this hasn't been communicated any way besides a blog post. You have my e-mail address: let me know! This shouldn't be surprise I find when I'm on HN. I log into my server regularly: I don't visit your blog every day. IMHO, off to a less-than-stellar start.
Fingers crossed because moving sites ain't fun.
Case in point: mosso's control panel rarely worked. Not once did I manage to see a list of my databases. But look at slicehost's control panel. It is by far the best I've seen, and believe me I've seen many.
So for now, color me skeptical.
I love Slicehost, and have received nothing but great service and support from them. Their articles are indispensable, and their control panel is simply world class.
What I dislike is Rackspaces shady pricing practise, the fact that whenever I've dealt with Rackspace as I've come away with quotes that were wildly excessive, and generally the view that Rackspace are a large company focused on new sales through hard-selling practises rather than focusing on customer service and their existing customer base.
To me, Rackspace are the most-reputed of a very bad bunch (the best of the worst). Slicehost are the shining star of a new breed (the best of the best).
As a Slicehost customer I really do not want to see Slicehost become anything like Rackspace, at all. Instead I want to see the opposite, Rackspace become more like Slicehost. But will that happen? Well... did the Slicehost guys get Rackspace board seats? There's your answer.
I'll wait and see, but whilst I had loyalty to Slicehost and the people there I won't feel loyalty towards Rackspace. Should I feel any affect on the service I receive, through price increase, impact on backups, downtime, etc... I'll jump.
As others have said: DON'T FUCK IT UP, RACKSPACE.
Not least because with this many entrepreneurs here with growing ventures, it might not be the wisest business decision to piss them all off.
edit: Looks like they will be under the Mosso line? http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers.jsp
you can expect huge increases in prices[...]
[edit]
Oh, and cause we keep forgetting to announce it. If you have private IP addresses on any of your slices, new slices will automatically get built with a private IP.
LE: Also, if I may... the tone of the FAQ is a bit corporate. I don't think it's the right approach with your target. Ex:
How does this acquisition affect Slicehost customers
Our number one goal is to continue delivering the Slicehost experience. In fact, we hope to make it even better.
It's a very nice answer, and contains zero information. Just saying :)
AND Rackspace also bought Jungledisk.
Rackspace is suddenly a whole lot more compelling.
What's "competitive"?
So when you ask for pricing information, you get a call from a account manager, who helps you find what you need and offers a price. For instance if you need a server to do your email there are a lot of options and solutions to choose from, managed server or exchange mailboxes.
Ofcourse at that moment they'll try to sell you some more, like file hosting, terminal services etc...
It's just not a plan A, B and C with options x y z company.
And I don't want that. I know how to build/manage stuff, so I want to know how much it costs to have a server there. The less they have to do, the better for both of us - the only thing I need them for is to kick the hardware if it has a problem.
They just want to talk to you to get everything set up like you want/need it.
How much memory does your server need? Need a backup solution? How bout an apc module? What are the bandwith requirements, do you need multi or single gigabit lines? Like I said, their business works more on a case by case basis instead of select a, b or c and proceed to checkout. I'm not saying you have to join them, but they're a good, solid serviceprovider.
I was thinking of getting a slice with Slicehost, but now I'm not so sure. I guess it's too early to tell what will happen.
If you read "Included with Every Cloud Server" it reads just like the Slicehost homepage including this gem: "Slicehost management portal for reboots and software installs".
I'm wondering whether Rackspace will keep around the Slicehost brand (ala HP/Compaq) or just put everything under the Mosso brand. I am excited for the possibility of an S3-like storage system under the same roof as Slicehost. Maybe Amazon will start thinking of making lower-powered EC2 instances to compete with Mosso?
We moved to the 'premiere rails hosting provider' (I won't say which one, but it's the current one, not the old one) and after moving to their 'managed' environment I realised that the grass isn't always greener.
Rackspace were not able to manage our application, but it's been more effort having to manage the managers so to speak, verify everything they did, and now we have a significantly more complicated setup.
In short, trying not to go off topic, I found Rackspace to be quite damn good at what they did (hardware, and provisioning). I could get a new box up and going in 24-48 hours with them, built to my specifications and sealed and delivered. The current premier provider take 'up to a week' to provision us a new VPS web slice, go figure.
I've used them with two different companies, and in my experience they are nothing short of excellent. Yes their managed service cost is quite high, but its worth every penny if you want to sleep well at night.
Is a slicehost slice considered 'cloud computing'?
Scoble and others are comparing slicehost to EC2 and amzn web services, but doesn't slicehost compete more with traditional dedicated hosting and other vps providers?