
Rackspace acquire Slicehost - maryrosecook
http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2008/10/22/big-news-today
======
benkant
The great thing about Slicehost was the size. They were big enough to be
reliable but small enough to give a shit when you had a question on #slicehost
on freenode.

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.

~~~
boredguy8
I hate to be a content-less "ditto", so let me only highlight that this
comment represents a LOT of people's views. They were always very responsive
(hell, direct support in IRC!) and it would be a shame to lose that. But it's
a big field out there, and I (and I bet most) have no problem walking away if
things go poorly under new management.

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.

~~~
mncaudill
If only there was some kind of way to Really Simply Syndicate content...

~~~
avinashv
That's not fair. I'm not a Slicehost--uh, Rackspace customer, but if I was, I
have more than enough stuff in my newsreader that I wouldn't want to subscribe
to their blog.

------
cstejerean
Now I'm just waiting for GitHub to be acquired by SourceForge so another one
of the companies I love doing business with can fall in the hands of one I'm
trying to avoid like the plague.

~~~
master
If this were Digg, this would be the point at which someone would insert an
ASCII representation of Admiral Ackbar saying "IT'S A TRAP!"

------
agotterer
On a business note, congratulations. On a personal note I'm not looking
forward to this acquisition. For one I like the current price model, which is
very reasonable. Rackspace is extraordinarily expensive. In my experience the
customer service from the small slice host team is fantastic. I usually send a
support email and receive a response within an hour. Hopefully we dont end up
with account managers now.

------
pierrefar
I just hope Rackspace doesn't mess up slicehost to make it as "good" as mosso.
I tried mosso before running away to slicehost.

Fingers crossed because moving sites ain't fun.

~~~
pxlpshr
Just got back from the Rackspace Cloud event in Austin and was pleasantly
surprised to say the least. Lanham (CEO) came by and talked with us at
length... very genuine about delivering a fanatical experience for Mosso, and
it's very evident to me that they're putting a lot of beef behind that
statement. Looking forward to migrating to Mosso soon...

~~~
pierrefar
I was also suprised by how bad mosso was when I tried it a few months ago.
Slicehost is such a great breath of fresh air compared to it.

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.

~~~
jfornear
I've been using mosso for about 6 months, and I am surprised that I haven't
found something to bitch about yet. I've never experienced that database
problem, but the few problems I have come across have been dealt with quickly
through their 24/7 chat support.

------
buro9
This has really left me cold.

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.

------
tortilla
Awesome, but I hope they don't change pricing too much.

edit: Looks like they will be under the Mosso line?
<http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers.jsp>

~~~
mtw
nice find, but i'm wondering the difference between this and cloud sites

------
rob
Let's hope they don't do to Slicehost what they did to Webmail.us after
acquiring them. If they do, you can expect huge increases in prices and a
focus more on corporate/"big" clients.

~~~
0x44

      you can expect huge increases in prices[...]
    

We cut the prices of our 2GB and larger slice offerings, along with announcing
IP failover, and removing the mandatory 3-month prepayment on signup.

[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.

~~~
jah
Any chance you could double the storage limits for the smaller slices?

~~~
0x44
We don't have any plans to change the plans right now.

------
rantfoil
AND they rolled out 8 GB and 15.5GB slices. AWESOME.

AND Rackspace also bought Jungledisk.

Rackspace is suddenly a whole lot more compelling.

~~~
unalone
I've heard really terrible things about Rackspace from quite a few people. I'm
really hoping they don't mess up the people they've bought.

~~~
bisceglie
that would be useful if this article was about Rackhost.

~~~
nailer
So you're point is that it's useful? No need to post, you can just moderate
unalone up.

------
mdasen
It seems that Rackspace is going to turn Slicehost into "Mosso Cloud Servers":
<http://cloud.rackspace.com/cloudservers.jsp>

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?

------
zemote
We run <http://www.edmodo.com> on slicehost and love it. I'm a bit worried
about the rackspace aquisition, but giving them the benefit of doubt for now.

------
ryan-allen
I've used both Rackspace and Slicehost in production settings, and they both
have their drawbacks and advantages.

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.

------
jamongkad
My company's beta testing app is hosted at SliceHost. I'm happy for the
SliceHost guys but given Rackspace's reputation I was not very happy with this
acquisition. Maybe it's cuz I'm afraid SliceHost might lose it's small tech
company service...

~~~
matthewking
Where does this bad reputation thing come from, this thread is the first I've
ever heard of rackspace having a bad reputation.

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.

~~~
rob
Search webhostingtalk.com; there are plenty of bad reviews of RS.

~~~
aventer
webhostingtalk is hosted at RS!

------
utnick
Question about terminology:

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?

~~~
cstejerean
I think slicehost is definitely close to EC2 in that you can programmatically
bring nodes up and down so you can build a flexible infrastructure.

~~~
lux
Exactly. Their API for me is _the_ distinguishing factor that means I can
build SaaS-based offerings on top of them, and at a more affordable rate than
EC2 as well. You don't necessarily need the horsepower of a full 24x7 EC2
instance, and a basic $20/mo slice can do a lot.

------
subbu
I really like the guys at slicehost. They can answer all your technical
questions in a few short sentences. They are pretty quick and responsive. Hope
Rackspace uses these skills along with their servers.

------
abstractbill
Very well deserved. Congrats Slicehost!

------
callmeed
We use and love both companies.

------
brianm
Folks I know using rackspace love them, so hopefully this will go well.

