CenturyLink Said to Seek to Acquire Rackspace Hosting | Hacker News Reader

CenturyLink Said to Seek to Acquire Rackspace Hosting

bloomberg.com

77 pointsantr51 comments

Well that's my daily dose of humility: a company with $20 billion a year in revenue that I had never heard of.

They've been a provider for other providers so their presence has been masked a bit. Many smaller, regional, ISPs frequently resell through them.

Same here, until they acquired Appfog (phpfog) last year.

They suddenly got a lot bigger when they bought/merged with Qwest a few years back. They weren't one of the baby bells -- they grew independently.

CenturyLink— Formerly CenturyTel and Qwest, formerly US West.

Also merged with Embarq, which was previously Sprint's local arm.

Also, completely unrelated, but they are the namesake of the CenturyLink football stadium, home of the Seattle Seahawks. This is how I learned of their existence, which proves that there is at least some nominal value to having a stadium named after your company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CenturyLink_Field

And US West spawned out of Ma' Bell.

CenturyLink's business in my area is extremely overpriced, very slow, very poor quality DSL connections. Their customers are technology-illiterate old people and business who haven't looked seriously at their infrastructure since the 90s. It's also pretty rare, since Road Runner and U-Verse are far superior for consumers and tw telecom provides fiber to downtown businesses.

A @centurylink.com email address in 2014 conveys roughly the same thing as an @aol.com address: a nice young man set up my computer for me sometime around 2002 and nothing has changed since.

Why is a company like this buying one of the most modern/progressive and least stodgy hosting companies in existence? It feels like IBM buying Apple or something. There must be more to CenturyLink than is visible to a consumer.

I ended up a CenturyLink customer with the Qwest merger.

And yet here I sit in my apartment, in downtown Portland, OR, on a symmetrical 1gbit/s Internet connection, provided by Centurylink.

They're not backwards / old in every market. Particularly in the markets they took over from Qwest.

Aye, that's the boat I'm in. They're expensive, around $80 a month, but they have better CS than the cable company and they also have the fastest service I can get where I live (40 down, 5 up, and most of the time I actually get it)

I pay $75 a month for wireless 6mbs and 90ms ping times to google..

Totally torn about this potential acquisition as (1) a longtime RAX shareholder who would see good returns from such a move and (2) as a supporter of their OSS contributions who fears the effect such an acquisition would have towards the resources put toward their OSS efforts.

Not sure how to reconcile this within myself, though (somewhat sadly) I find myself rooting for the acquisition. :(

CenturyLink has a surprising amount of open source, especially around Docker and CoreOS: https://github.com/CenturyLinkLabs

Looks like this was released in August: http://panamax.io

Iirc they also acquired the paas provider AppFog in 2013.

They did. I am the founder of AppFog. CenturyLink has treated me great.

what's the high level plan for AppFog?

> Entrenched ISP buys hip hosting provider

Not a fan... though, as a former small-time customer, RAX just couldn't keep up on the drive to the bottom with pricing ala DigitalOcean or others.

You realize Rackspace doesn't compete with Digital Ocean?

Sure they do. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/

One thing worth keeping in mind: it's no longer possible to purchase "raw infrastructure" on the Rackspace cloud; new accounts only have the option of "Managed Cloud" [1], which includes a service charge (minimum $50/month/account, on top of the hourly rate per server):

> We don't offer raw infrastructure without service. Because it takes more than high-performance, reliable infrastructure to succeed in the cloud. It takes full-featured, optimized platforms, and the expertise to run workloads wherever they'll achieve the highest performance, security, cost efficiency, and scalability.

> That's why we include high-touch service and expertise with every account.

(disclaimer: I interned at Rackspace this past summer)

[1] http://www.rackspace.com/managed-cloud/

That's not a disclaimer. It's a disclosure.

Ohai, minion! Come back next summer!

if we do get bought out by CL, I won't blame you for not coming back

No, it competes with Linode. Having used both, I found Linode vastly superior in every way. (Currently using Linode for rationalwiki.org. Cheap and reliable.)

Can you enumerate any of those ways?

Big one: it's possible to send a bloody email from a Linode. Rackspace put all their nodes into the various DNSBLs, and offer email as a separate nickel-and-dimed service.

Littler ones: service and quality of service for little problems. I realise we're buying at the low end, where dealing with a customer at all blows that month's hosting fee, but somehow Linode managed way better tech support and customer service.

Bonus: Linode keep doubling what you get at a price point, with no action beyond a reboot on your part.

So if you want low-end hosting, where you do need to keep your own backups just in case, etc. ... I would heartily recommend Linode to anyone.

FYI since RS bought MailGun, they offer each RS customer 50,000 emails per month via Mailgun (though limited to 4-5 domains).

RS seems to be moving to higher minimum service levels tool -- existing plans are grandfathered, but new users will at least have to select a $50/month minimum support plan.

Yeah, I'm not tempted back.

I've come across rationalwiki.org a few times in my travels. Nice work. Glad to see you are a fellow HNer.

RAX is more full-service, sure, but it seems the market isn't as sustainable there.

Full service as in they sell things like accountability, certification, and someone to point a finger at. Smaller companies don't have the resources to do the things Rackspace can, which is why they are able to price their services so high.

People always forget that big companies do business with big companies so that they have someone big enough to sue if a major deal gets soured. (See BP trying to sue everyone related to the oil rig that started the Gulf spill to get money back)

Of course they do. In the sense that a smartphone app competes with a printed book.

While they are completely different things, for many users in many circumstances they are substitutes.

I worked for a startup that got into the rackspace program and had several thousand $/month free in rackspace services. The same amount of raw power on DO would have cost 200$/month, but a couple of 20$/month DO VMs would have been ample.

And for prototyping you usually don't need anything more sophisticated than a VM (or a free heroku account for that matter ...)

Rackspace Cloud does. We switched.

Yeah... I've seen all the other posts equating CL with US Worst. You are missing the thread on this.

Rackspace offers its' own revenue stream that makes an acquisition worthwhile and it has sever traffic that nearly perfectly balances CL's residential traffic. This should make it easier to negotiate peering agreements with tier 1's.

So this deal is revenue neutral and offers the possibility of reducing costs through economies of scale and peering... looks like a win-win for CL. In fact, on reflection, it looks alot like the GC Frontier merger in the 90's... Datacenters and iLEC mergers are somewhat old hat... the success of these pairings is varied ;)

I've heard nothing good about CenturyLink. People I know who have them as a provider almost universally hate it.

Does anyone like their cable company? How do they compare to Comcast, Time-Warner, Cablevision?

One data point, but sonic.net is great. Friendly service and consistently given top marks by the EFF on privacy concerns. Also, it's reasonably cheap and you can get a static ip with your service.

Edit: I'm not affiliated in any way.

Yes, we need more regional examples like the Bay Area's sonic, with a decade-plus track record of survival and quality.

I have had both Comcast and CenturyLink for several years and I just dropped the Comcast connection and kept CenturyLink. I haven't really had any problems with them.

I've been with Cox in Tempe... the cable service, except when the technicians mistakenly disconnected me instead of another apartment (twice), or when they disconnected my business connection at my old location 4 days before the scheduled install at the new location for my new location, has been great...

The speeds are great, the uptime (excetions noted) great... They seem to have some serious logistical issues, but the internet connection itself has been good. 120mb down, around 22mb up.

They tend to let things linger and die rather than keeping them up or improve them.

I had Sprint as a local phone company and DSL ISP in the early to mid-2000s. The other options in this small town were cable, but with a dial-up uplink or Hughes satellite.

Sprint was a great ISP, downtime was perhaps two times over the years. CenturyLink purchased the phone and DSL from Sprint, and coasted along on Sprint's old infrastructure for a about a year then the bandwidth exhaustion set it. First it was the peak times that were unusable, then it was just about anytime day or night that latency was through the roof. Fixing it was just around the corner. When I switched to cable, it took another 2-3 years to resolve it.

Maybe an outlier, but they are providing 12mbs service to my rural home in S. Oregon, and 40mbs fiber service to my apartment in Portland. Both work great and are very reliable.

They sponsor a nice stadium in Seattle.

Count me in the anecdata column against that. I have Comcast at home which disconnects 6 times per day for 5-30 minutes per session and they refuse to believe it is their fault (constant ranging response timeouts on two DOCSIS modems says otherwise) and CenturyLink at work is up 24/7 with only one restart of the modem needed in the last 12 months with consistent 30/30 bandwidth for $50/month.

CenturyLink doesn't serve my home with anything better than 6/1 service otherwise I'd use them. Thank god for regional monopolies.

I'll be happy to provide my name in the against column. I used to subscribe to an ADSL service starting about a decade ago through a local ISP, but I was required to lease the copper connection through Qwest which was acquired by CenturyLink. I could always tell when someone new moved into the neighborhood and signed up with CenturyLink because the technician would always climb up the pole and disconnect me in order to hook up their line. That's not to say that my speeds weren't great (was paying for 7/1, which is what I received), but the cost on the leased line was extraordinary. By the time I canceled the monthly bill for a dead phone line to my ISP climbed from about $25 to $60, still for 7/1 service.

I only switched to Comcast at home last year because it was 2013 and 1Mbit upload speeds for the price I was paying was ridiculous. At least with Comcast I know how to play the "the cost is too high, do you have any special offers this month?" game. They've been just as consistent, without the physical disconnects.

They've been my ISP for 2 years. No problems at all. I haven't had to use support, so I can't speak to that side of things. Connection has been solid though.

I have CenturyLink in Salt Lake City. I get 60Mbps down 20mbps up for 35$ a month. My SNR is great and my line attentuation is great. I haven't had a single issue with CL. Perhaps the service is good as Google Fiber is coming.

They're OK in cities where they have enough competition to make them invest in infrastructure. They're effing terrible if you're somewhere there's not enough competition for them to ever invest in infrastructure. My customer service experiences with them have also been terrible - incompetent CSRs, clueless techs.

Basically like any megaprovider, they only do as much as competition forces them to.

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