
CenturyLink Said to Seek to Acquire Rackspace Hosting - antr
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-07/centurylink-said-to-seek-to-acquire-rackspace-hosting.html
======
patio11
Well that's my daily dose of humility: a company with $20 billion a year in
revenue that I had never heard of.

~~~
Raphael
CenturyLink— Formerly CenturyTel and Qwest, formerly US West.

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

------
superuser2
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.

~~~
irq
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.

~~~
Karunamon
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)

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

------
hkmurakami
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. :(

~~~
saryant
CenturyLink has a surprising amount of open source, especially around Docker
and CoreOS:
[https://github.com/CenturyLinkLabs](https://github.com/CenturyLinkLabs)

~~~
walterbell
Looks like this was released in August: [http://panamax.io](http://panamax.io)

------
relaxitup
Iirc they also acquired the paas provider AppFog in 2013.

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

~~~
hayksaakian
what's the high level plan for AppFog?

------
unethical_ban
> 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.

~~~
hkuiouhuijuhkjb
You realize Rackspace doesn't compete with Digital Ocean?

~~~
davidgerard
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.)

~~~
FireBeyond
Can you enumerate any of those ways?

~~~
davidgerard
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.

~~~
Erwin
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.

~~~
davidgerard
Yeah, I'm not tempted back.

------
oldbuzzard
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 ;)

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

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

~~~
gsoltis
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.

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

