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Rackspace announces it has laid off 200 workers

160 points by doppp 8y ago

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
Looks like they're going after a more high-caliber employee, cutting the "weak-links" they have now.
- jpmontez 8y ago
  The people that were fired are high-caliber. I know a few that literally wrote the books for their field.
crikli 8y ago
Their service level went from amazing to awful once they were purchased by private equity. As a result after having been Rackspace clients since 2007 my company started moving our clients away from them over 24 months ago and finished November of last year. I very much miss when their support truly was fanatical. Edit: duration of service, clarity
- antidaily 8y ago
  My experience as well.
- jwdunne 8y ago
  Yes. They say the bulk of the cost is fanatical support but it's been far and away from that lately. It's like £1000 a month for a low end server and crap support. It's ridiculous now. For example, we agreed a planned maintenance window 2 weeks ago. It happened, it failed and they left the server offline for 7 hours after the window cut off. We asked of compensation was available. It took 7 days just for the account manager to say no. I can accept that it's in the ToS but is 7 days for a response from our account manager 'fanatical support'? We're in the process of moving our WP sites to WPEngine, where the support is much better, and software we maintain for clients to AWS for a fraction of the cost either way.
  - crikli 8y ago
    Man...it sucks because they used to be so great. 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.
    - jwdunne 8y ago
      They were incredible. In fact, so good that it was educational. Whenever we had a problem, I'd ask for full technical details and I'd come away with something. A big portion of my admittedly limited knowledge of sysadmin work came simply from working with their admins to fix problems that'd come up with growth. That's not the case anymore and it's clear nobody gives a hoot. We are getting a DDoS a few months ago. Their solution: null route our server. Wanted DDoS mitigation options. They wanted me to speak to a sales rep, who insisted it wasn't a sales call, and refused to put their possible options in writing. As a rule, I only make decisions or open discussions if and only if I have something to discuss in writing. That never used to be a problem. Everything was transparent. It's become a nightmare driven by sales reps that want to "customise" a solution - the same kind of solution that they deployed a few years ago that worked for the exact same problem.
- grecy 8y ago
  I have a dedicated linux VPS with them and use their CDN a lot. The prices seem so high, I'm considering moving. Any suggestions?
  - mdasen 8y ago
    There's the usual suspects like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. If you're just looking for a VPS, DigitalOcean is cheap and easy.
    - jdhawk 8y ago
      and Linode.
      - noir_lord 8y ago
        Linode have been my goto since ~2010. Never had any downtime and the only degradation I can remember was when they got hit by a collosal DDoS a few Christmases ago (since then they've invested very heavily on ensuring that can't happen again, US DC's where down/sporadically up for days). Hands down my default choice.
      - mifreewil 8y ago
        I’d stay away from Linode. They’ve had so many major security issues over the years that at this point they are like the Yahoo Mail of VPS in my mind.
    - Wintereise 8y ago
      There's AWS LightSail too.
  - morganvachon 8y ago
    Vultr or HostUS. Vultr's support is top-notch and their plans are flexible and reasonable. I don't work for either but I've hosted with both (still do with Vultr) and love both.
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  PE ownership explains everything. This is going exactly per the PE playbook.
- Neil44 8y ago
  I had boxes on Rackspace and Linode at 1/10 the price, if anything Linode was better on both uptime and support. At one time Rackspace justifies the price tag, but that’s not been for years now.
- simonebrunozzi 8y ago
  They focused on Professional Services - that's what Apollo (the private firm that acquired them) thought it would make sense business-wise. And somehow it did, although it probably costed the company its soul, and now increasingly his loyal customers. A pity.
ykevinator 8y ago
I never understood why they existed. They charge $1,000 for a $50 server and there service is as good as Amazon.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  They used to be amazing. 15 years ago if you rented a server from them you were getting a sysadmin into the bargain. For companies without that expertise in house (or who didn’t need enough to justify a full time position) and for whom shared hosting wasn’t an acceptable alternative, they were the perfect option.
  - mgkimsal 8y ago
    Early on, their deal was that when you called, you always got a human. 24x7. I called early Sunday morning. Human after 2 rings, transferred to the correct dept within 15 seconds, to another real human, who took acknowledged and took care of a tech problem within a few minutes. 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.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      That level of service is definitely available when you're talking enterprise-level contracts, but those are worth much more than $1k/month. At only $1k/month you aren't going to get that kind of service in many places.
      - mgkimsal 8y ago
        I think at the time - 1999(?) (soon after rackspace had started up) we were at a $500/month server. And... they made a mistake early on. We'd requested a new machine, but someone had done the ticket wrong, and took the old one offline for an upgrade (instead of just adding a new machine to the account). They were minutes away from wiping it when I called - if I'd had an automated attendant, we would have lost everything on there, but humans intervened to stop them in time and get it back online. "Great service!" - except they'd made the mistake in the first place...
christophilus 8y ago
I've got some old projects running on Rackspace. Did you move away from Rackspace? If so, where'd you move, and how do you like it?
- crikli 8y ago
  Digital Ocean for stuff that absolutely has to have its own sandbox. Support is slow and ticket only but it's cheap enough you can build out a cluster to mitigate outages. Pantheon for most Drupal sites. Amazing service. Should have made the move years ago. Platform.sh for some Drupal sites and for various NodeJS projects. Various CDNs for asset serving. Almost everything is available now "as-a-service". The case where a custom server that you manage via SSH is the best solution is now the minority.
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    I'll echo this--we moved nearly 100 sites off of Rackspace over the past year. All the Wordpress sites went to WP Engine, and the Drupal sites to Pantheon. 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.
- thrownaway954 8y ago
  For Windows... Hosting.com Hands down expensive as hell but AMAZING support. For Linux... Inmotion Hosting Reasonably priced, but UNBELIEVABLE support. Seems like everyone working at these two companies is a wizard that put on their robe and hat before work. When you pay for hosting you want someone on call and smarter than you for when things go south.
cimmanom 8y ago
I wonder if there’s room in the market these days for a new managed dedicated hosting service like Rackspace used to be, where you paid significantly more than for an unmanaged server (or a “managed” server that basically just gets OS security patches) so you could instantly reach an expert sysadmin to fix any problem with your servers.
- Bombthecat 8y ago
  I don't think so, there is aws and then there is "host super cheap" Rackspace might have had a chance, but it is gone now..
  - mooreds 8y ago
    I think there are companies like this, but they are focused on a niche (wpengine, Pantheon) rather than being for general purpose hosting.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  That's the problem; hosting is a commodity these days. 90% of people who want hosting only compare based on price. It's hard to justify paying "real staff" high wages when the margins are razor thin. Big hosts can survive by essentially offloading support, and making as much as possible self-managed by the end-user. The non-technical people who just want "a server that works" won't, broadly speaking, pay a premium for that. They're non-technical and will eat up support-hours too, asking questions about setting file permissions on Wordpress.
  - mgkimsal 8y ago
    this seems like ... race to the bottom perhaps? or prisoner's dilemma? or some other catchphrase to describe a common market problem. 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.
seltzered_ 8y ago
Previous layoff discussion from feb 2017 (~200 too): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13593416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13593416 Supposedly this is an annual thing now: https://www.tpr.org/post/third-year-row-february-rackspace-layoffs https://www.tpr.org/post/third-year-row-february-rackspace-l...
- tyingq 8y ago
  So annual rank/stack, bell curve, fire x%. Right after performance reviews, and right before any annual raises. Typical slog of working at a recently PE purchased company. I wonder if anyone talented is left. Usually they get sick of it after a year or two. I would guess little to no real RSU handcuffs. The stock was badly underwater before it went private.
  - ssimpson 8y ago
    it was more senior people this time. But it has been that way the last couple times too. I have a few very talented friends that lost their jobs. They also pretty much cut out a bunch of the private cloud group. Sad to see such a good company go this direction.
  - raxthrowaway0 8y ago
    > So annual rank/stack, bell curve, fire x%. Right after performance reviews, and right before any annual raises. 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.)
gcb0 8y ago
I call it the yahoo fenomena. buy a lot of stock on number one (google, or Amazon in this case), then use your money or previous position on number two or three company in the same market to influence the board to drive the company value to the ground. now you can claim loss on the secondary position while creating a bigger monopolistic market for your main position for the long run.
jasonjayr 8y ago
Oh man. I've had a VPS with them since before they acquired SliceHost, and have been paying a (way overpriced) $20/mo for a SINGLE 512mb server just because the IP reputation is super squeaky clean, as it's my mail server. They just announced a $5 hike in price this month for "fanatical" support, I haven't opened a support request with them in eons: > In July 2014, Rackspace introduced a minimum support fee of $50 for all new accounts to offset the rising cost of providing Fanatical Support. Legacy accounts like yours were unaffected by this change, keeping your previous rate without a support fee for the past four years. Effective February 2019, you will see the addition of a $5 support fee on your invoice. I've been grooming a elastic IP @ AWS for the last year, and rackspace is getting dropped this week.
- fyfy18 8y ago
  What tools do you use to monitor IP cleanliness? I monitor mine with free blacklist monitoring tools, but a lot of my emails to corporate addresses end up bouncing. The rejection message often gives a generic error so I'm not sure if that's my fault or not.
  - jasonjayr 8y ago
    I use the free tools as well, but most of the folks I consult for, I also administer their mail account server @ Google or Microsoft, so I can keep an eye on both sides of the transaction. Implementing SPF/DKIM/DMARC/smtp-tls also helped keep things clean. You can register as a postmaster @ AOL, Microsoft & Google, and also get reports if something is reported as spam. 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.
    - 8y ago
Theodores 8y ago
Rackspace had it good with the little incentives they gave to web agencies. The agencies would build websites for companies that didn't really need $$$ servers as they were new to being online and didn't have the customers yet. Rather than recommend sensible hosting that could scale, e.g. a VPS that had the RAM, CPU, disk and bandwidth low to start with and an option to upgrade later, the agency would sell the newbie client the gold plated Rackspace solution. What wasn't discussed with the client was how Rackspace would cough up a handy referral fee whereas the price competitive VPS would not. I felt bad for clients that had been suckered with that cost burden, particularly if the customers did not show up after go-live. It was like the online equivalent of them being lumbered with a giant mall when they needed a prominent spot on the High Street. Nowadays though services like AWS have taken on this agency provided hosting setup.
- raxthrowaway0 8y ago
  You are aware that pretty much every hosting organization in existence pays referral fees, yes? Including "cheap VPS that can scale" (also known as: a contradiction in terms). https://www.linode.com/referrals https://www.linode.com/referrals https://www.digitalocean.com/referral-program/ https://www.digitalocean.com/referral-program/ https://www.vultr.com/news/Summer-Promo-Now-Earn-%2430-For-Every-Referral/ https://www.vultr.com/news/Summer-Promo-Now-Earn-%2430-For-E... You're also clearly unaware that Rackspace built itself and went public on colocation, which dates your perspective. "What type of servers to use" is such a variable question for each outfit, and even with a web-focused startup perspective like this one, there's so much variance in work that colocation often made sense at the time. Time sharing a VPS with Bob's IRC Vhost Service often does not.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    There's a pretty big difference between what Rackspace pays in referral fees: "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.
exabrial 8y ago
Rackspace is sort of mind blowing. They were first to market, had excellent personable customer service, yet somehow now the early lead with a lack of broader vision and ambition.
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  Pretty typical story. Incumbents being replaced because they rely on the formula that got them there, so don't keep up with the market.
- zelon88 8y ago
  That's ultimately what this seems like. Unfortunately from reading some of the comments it appears that private equity took over RS at some point and now it's just gonna be their cash cow until they go bankrupt. They haven't done much innovation wise in years. Its really sad.
linkmotif 8y ago
Does this affect mailgun? Is that a profitable revenue stream for them?
- burlesona 8y ago
  Mailgun spun off a while back and isn’t Rackspace anymore.
  - linkmotif 8y ago
    Still thought it had the association some how.
    - Shakahs 8y ago
      Based on traceroutes and IP ownership Mailgun appears to have migrated mostly to AWS (web app, DNS, SMTP relay) but still uses some Rackspace infrastructure; emails delivered from my Mailgun account come from the Rackspace data center in Chicago.
      - linkmotif 8y ago
        Thank you
williesleg 8y ago
That graph is the best example of fake news in existence today. Why combine the cloud vendors like that? Obviously an agenda.
iandanforth 8y ago
Are these people under non-competes? I see a dozen customers for a competing (read: "clone") company with 'fanatical' support in the comments.
- kazanz 8y ago
  There are companies out there. I work at one of them, www.hivelocity.net. We provide the managed services and support everyone is talking about in 8 US cities. One of the primary reasons we are in business is the technical experts on staff that are constantly helping our clients, which is obviously expensive. I think the issue you don’t see “pop up” competitors is the inability to market “great support” empirically. There is a lemon market comment somewhere that is dead on. You can have all the high cost experts on staff but Everyone is going to think your marketing is full of it until they try your services or are referred via word of mouth.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
So the decline into Burst.Net territory has begun...
zeta0134 8y ago
I happen to work for Rackspace at the moment, and I'm really disappointed that I keep hearing about these things in the news first. Ever since we went private, all the upper management changed and we've kinda been kept in the dark, which is a big giant red flag. I think it might be time to polish up the old resume.
- tyingq 8y ago
  I would guess their planned exit is hoping IBM buys it to bolster marketshare for Bluemix/Softlayer. So, even if things go as planned, it's probably not anywhere you want to be long term :)
  - pm90 8y ago
    IBM won't buy them. They just bought RedHat.
- askafriend 8y ago
  Don’t even think twice. Polish that resume and jump. The market is hot and life is short.
  - redm 8y ago
    Uh, you should always think twice, the grass isn't always better on the other side and you know nothing more about his/her circumstances.
    - tedivm 8y ago
      We know he's working for a company where management doesn't communicate and layoffs are happening. Polishing off a resume doesn't mean immediately quitting either- it means going out to look at other opportunities. There are very few scenarios where being aware of other options is harmful.
bitzun 8y ago
I heard from someone inside that at least one office's developer reqs were all moved to India, inducing a pretty big morale hit.
- exUKRacker 8y ago
  All backfills and new support roles are going out to India and Mexico
ratling 8y ago
That company cannot implode fast enough. I will never do business with them again after they hell they put me through (twice) with their inherently broken security model Rest In Piss.
jimmywanger 8y ago
I used to work for rackspace. I'll answer any questions you might have, this was 2 years ago. My take is that they were pivoting HARD away from the server business and trying to provide "cloud architecture solutions", where they would tell you how to properly set up your GCP and Amazon clouds to fit your needs. From inside the company, coming from the silicon valley, the culture was rather jarring. They're from San Antonio, and try to hard to be hip and silicon valley-ish, but it's just in the uncanny valley where everything is a little bit... off. Also, it might be the corporate culture in San Antonio, but they try really hard to incoporate the new employees into "the family". For instance, all new employees have to get flown to San Antonio for a week of team building exercises and orientation. To me, it almost seemed culty.
- orestis 8y ago
  Any opinions on that cloud architecture solution service? Would you recommend it for a company with very little AWS experience?
  - jpd- 8y ago
    Companies like you describe are the primary focus of Rackspace these days.
  - alchemism 8y ago
    That ship has sailed, I’m afraid. Use AWS Lightsail for an equivalent and learn from the ground up.
  - jimmywanger 8y ago
    Bear in mind they've only started this initiative about 2-3 years ago. 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.
  - 8y ago
T3RMINATED 8y ago
Rackspace has not innovated since the 90s.
Sam_Harris 8y ago
Aren't they infamous for their spam support?
new_guy 8y ago
So they laid off 200 workers but they now have 200 job openings? Why not just retrain existing workers instead of laying them off? Stuff like this seems like the quickest way to kill morale and run the business into the ground.
- raxthrow2022 8y ago
  I had the same thought when I heard about this internally. Especially given that our company wishes to "retain the top tech talent" and "become/remain a destination employer". Morale is indeed quite low because of this :(
- quacker 8y ago
  Agreed but job openings in different areas most likely. Hypothetical example: you lay off 200 developers and want to hire 200 sales/marketing folks. Devs don't want to be retrained in marketing (I sure wouldn't). But, also consider that the PE firm doesn't care all that much. They just need to make the numbers look good, so they replace highly paid veterans for cheaper junior workers. And ultimately, they force the company into treading water with a smaller/cheaper workforce which makes the numbers look good in the short term so they can sell it. Sucks for the company though.
charliebrownau 8y ago
Wasnt rackspace one of the "woke" companies censoring people for what they hosted Another Go woke, go broke story
jimmydddd 8y ago
Are there any examples of companies bought by private equity firms that did not go down the drain? On the retail side, I recall Toys R Us and Sports Authority being examples of companies recently folding after the PE firms were enriched.

160 points by doppp 8y ago

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

Looks like they're going after a more high-caliber employee, cutting the "weak-links" they have now.

jpmontez 8y ago
The people that were fired are high-caliber. I know a few that literally wrote the books for their field.

crikli 8y ago

Their service level went from amazing to awful once they were purchased by private equity. As a result after having been Rackspace clients since 2007 my company started moving our clients away from them over 24 months ago and finished November of last year. I very much miss when their support truly was fanatical. Edit: duration of service, clarity

antidaily 8y ago
My experience as well.
jwdunne 8y ago
Yes. They say the bulk of the cost is fanatical support but it's been far and away from that lately. It's like £1000 a month for a low end server and crap support. It's ridiculous now. For example, we agreed a planned maintenance window 2 weeks ago. It happened, it failed and they left the server offline for 7 hours after the window cut off. We asked of compensation was available. It took 7 days just for the account manager to say no. I can accept that it's in the ToS but is 7 days for a response from our account manager 'fanatical support'? We're in the process of moving our WP sites to WPEngine, where the support is much better, and software we maintain for clients to AWS for a fraction of the cost either way.
- crikli 8y ago
  Man...it sucks because they used to be so great. 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.
  - jwdunne 8y ago
    They were incredible. In fact, so good that it was educational. Whenever we had a problem, I'd ask for full technical details and I'd come away with something. A big portion of my admittedly limited knowledge of sysadmin work came simply from working with their admins to fix problems that'd come up with growth. That's not the case anymore and it's clear nobody gives a hoot. We are getting a DDoS a few months ago. Their solution: null route our server. Wanted DDoS mitigation options. They wanted me to speak to a sales rep, who insisted it wasn't a sales call, and refused to put their possible options in writing. As a rule, I only make decisions or open discussions if and only if I have something to discuss in writing. That never used to be a problem. Everything was transparent. It's become a nightmare driven by sales reps that want to "customise" a solution - the same kind of solution that they deployed a few years ago that worked for the exact same problem.
grecy 8y ago
I have a dedicated linux VPS with them and use their CDN a lot. The prices seem so high, I'm considering moving. Any suggestions?
- mdasen 8y ago
  There's the usual suspects like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. If you're just looking for a VPS, DigitalOcean is cheap and easy.
  - jdhawk 8y ago
    and Linode.
    - noir_lord 8y ago
      Linode have been my goto since ~2010. Never had any downtime and the only degradation I can remember was when they got hit by a collosal DDoS a few Christmases ago (since then they've invested very heavily on ensuring that can't happen again, US DC's where down/sporadically up for days). Hands down my default choice.
    - mifreewil 8y ago
      I’d stay away from Linode. They’ve had so many major security issues over the years that at this point they are like the Yahoo Mail of VPS in my mind.
  - Wintereise 8y ago
    There's AWS LightSail too.
- morganvachon 8y ago
  Vultr or HostUS. Vultr's support is top-notch and their plans are flexible and reasonable. I don't work for either but I've hosted with both (still do with Vultr) and love both.
unclebucknasty 8y ago
PE ownership explains everything. This is going exactly per the PE playbook.
Neil44 8y ago
I had boxes on Rackspace and Linode at 1/10 the price, if anything Linode was better on both uptime and support. At one time Rackspace justifies the price tag, but that’s not been for years now.
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
They focused on Professional Services - that's what Apollo (the private firm that acquired them) thought it would make sense business-wise. And somehow it did, although it probably costed the company its soul, and now increasingly his loyal customers. A pity.

ykevinator 8y ago

I never understood why they existed. They charge $1,000 for a $50 server and there service is as good as Amazon.

cimmanom 8y ago
They used to be amazing. 15 years ago if you rented a server from them you were getting a sysadmin into the bargain. For companies without that expertise in house (or who didn’t need enough to justify a full time position) and for whom shared hosting wasn’t an acceptable alternative, they were the perfect option.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  Early on, their deal was that when you called, you always got a human. 24x7. I called early Sunday morning. Human after 2 rings, transferred to the correct dept within 15 seconds, to another real human, who took acknowledged and took care of a tech problem within a few minutes. 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.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    That level of service is definitely available when you're talking enterprise-level contracts, but those are worth much more than $1k/month. At only $1k/month you aren't going to get that kind of service in many places.
    - mgkimsal 8y ago
      I think at the time - 1999(?) (soon after rackspace had started up) we were at a $500/month server. And... they made a mistake early on. We'd requested a new machine, but someone had done the ticket wrong, and took the old one offline for an upgrade (instead of just adding a new machine to the account). They were minutes away from wiping it when I called - if I'd had an automated attendant, we would have lost everything on there, but humans intervened to stop them in time and get it back online. "Great service!" - except they'd made the mistake in the first place...

christophilus 8y ago

I've got some old projects running on Rackspace. Did you move away from Rackspace? If so, where'd you move, and how do you like it?

crikli 8y ago
Digital Ocean for stuff that absolutely has to have its own sandbox. Support is slow and ticket only but it's cheap enough you can build out a cluster to mitigate outages. Pantheon for most Drupal sites. Amazing service. Should have made the move years ago. Platform.sh for some Drupal sites and for various NodeJS projects. Various CDNs for asset serving. Almost everything is available now "as-a-service". The case where a custom server that you manage via SSH is the best solution is now the minority.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  I'll echo this--we moved nearly 100 sites off of Rackspace over the past year. All the Wordpress sites went to WP Engine, and the Drupal sites to Pantheon. 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.
thrownaway954 8y ago
For Windows... Hosting.com Hands down expensive as hell but AMAZING support. For Linux... Inmotion Hosting Reasonably priced, but UNBELIEVABLE support. Seems like everyone working at these two companies is a wizard that put on their robe and hat before work. When you pay for hosting you want someone on call and smarter than you for when things go south.

cimmanom 8y ago

I wonder if there’s room in the market these days for a new managed dedicated hosting service like Rackspace used to be, where you paid significantly more than for an unmanaged server (or a “managed” server that basically just gets OS security patches) so you could instantly reach an expert sysadmin to fix any problem with your servers.

Bombthecat 8y ago
I don't think so, there is aws and then there is "host super cheap" Rackspace might have had a chance, but it is gone now..
- mooreds 8y ago
  I think there are companies like this, but they are focused on a niche (wpengine, Pantheon) rather than being for general purpose hosting.
stevekemp 8y ago
That's the problem; hosting is a commodity these days. 90% of people who want hosting only compare based on price. It's hard to justify paying "real staff" high wages when the margins are razor thin. Big hosts can survive by essentially offloading support, and making as much as possible self-managed by the end-user. The non-technical people who just want "a server that works" won't, broadly speaking, pay a premium for that. They're non-technical and will eat up support-hours too, asking questions about setting file permissions on Wordpress.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  this seems like ... race to the bottom perhaps? or prisoner's dilemma? or some other catchphrase to describe a common market problem. 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.

seltzered_ 8y ago

Previous layoff discussion from feb 2017 (~200 too): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13593416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13593416 Supposedly this is an annual thing now: https://www.tpr.org/post/third-year-row-february-rackspace-layoffs https://www.tpr.org/post/third-year-row-february-rackspace-l...

tyingq 8y ago
So annual rank/stack, bell curve, fire x%. Right after performance reviews, and right before any annual raises. Typical slog of working at a recently PE purchased company. I wonder if anyone talented is left. Usually they get sick of it after a year or two. I would guess little to no real RSU handcuffs. The stock was badly underwater before it went private.
- ssimpson 8y ago
  it was more senior people this time. But it has been that way the last couple times too. I have a few very talented friends that lost their jobs. They also pretty much cut out a bunch of the private cloud group. Sad to see such a good company go this direction.
- raxthrowaway0 8y ago
  > So annual rank/stack, bell curve, fire x%. Right after performance reviews, and right before any annual raises. 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.)

gcb0 8y ago

I call it the yahoo fenomena. buy a lot of stock on number one (google, or Amazon in this case), then use your money or previous position on number two or three company in the same market to influence the board to drive the company value to the ground. now you can claim loss on the secondary position while creating a bigger monopolistic market for your main position for the long run.

jasonjayr 8y ago

Oh man. I've had a VPS with them since before they acquired SliceHost, and have been paying a (way overpriced) $20/mo for a SINGLE 512mb server just because the IP reputation is super squeaky clean, as it's my mail server. They just announced a $5 hike in price this month for "fanatical" support, I haven't opened a support request with them in eons: > In July 2014, Rackspace introduced a minimum support fee of $50 for all new accounts to offset the rising cost of providing Fanatical Support. Legacy accounts like yours were unaffected by this change, keeping your previous rate without a support fee for the past four years. Effective February 2019, you will see the addition of a $5 support fee on your invoice. I've been grooming a elastic IP @ AWS for the last year, and rackspace is getting dropped this week.

fyfy18 8y ago
What tools do you use to monitor IP cleanliness? I monitor mine with free blacklist monitoring tools, but a lot of my emails to corporate addresses end up bouncing. The rejection message often gives a generic error so I'm not sure if that's my fault or not.
- jasonjayr 8y ago
  I use the free tools as well, but most of the folks I consult for, I also administer their mail account server @ Google or Microsoft, so I can keep an eye on both sides of the transaction. Implementing SPF/DKIM/DMARC/smtp-tls also helped keep things clean. You can register as a postmaster @ AOL, Microsoft & Google, and also get reports if something is reported as spam. 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.
  - 8y ago

Theodores 8y ago

Rackspace had it good with the little incentives they gave to web agencies. The agencies would build websites for companies that didn't really need $$$ servers as they were new to being online and didn't have the customers yet. Rather than recommend sensible hosting that could scale, e.g. a VPS that had the RAM, CPU, disk and bandwidth low to start with and an option to upgrade later, the agency would sell the newbie client the gold plated Rackspace solution. What wasn't discussed with the client was how Rackspace would cough up a handy referral fee whereas the price competitive VPS would not. I felt bad for clients that had been suckered with that cost burden, particularly if the customers did not show up after go-live. It was like the online equivalent of them being lumbered with a giant mall when they needed a prominent spot on the High Street. Nowadays though services like AWS have taken on this agency provided hosting setup.

raxthrowaway0 8y ago
You are aware that pretty much every hosting organization in existence pays referral fees, yes? Including "cheap VPS that can scale" (also known as: a contradiction in terms). https://www.linode.com/referrals https://www.linode.com/referrals https://www.digitalocean.com/referral-program/ https://www.digitalocean.com/referral-program/ https://www.vultr.com/news/Summer-Promo-Now-Earn-%2430-For-Every-Referral/ https://www.vultr.com/news/Summer-Promo-Now-Earn-%2430-For-E... You're also clearly unaware that Rackspace built itself and went public on colocation, which dates your perspective. "What type of servers to use" is such a variable question for each outfit, and even with a web-focused startup perspective like this one, there's so much variance in work that colocation often made sense at the time. Time sharing a VPS with Bob's IRC Vhost Service often does not.
- tyingq 8y ago
  There's a pretty big difference between what Rackspace pays in referral fees: "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.

exabrial 8y ago

Rackspace is sort of mind blowing. They were first to market, had excellent personable customer service, yet somehow now the early lead with a lack of broader vision and ambition.

unclebucknasty 8y ago
Pretty typical story. Incumbents being replaced because they rely on the formula that got them there, so don't keep up with the market.
zelon88 8y ago
That's ultimately what this seems like. Unfortunately from reading some of the comments it appears that private equity took over RS at some point and now it's just gonna be their cash cow until they go bankrupt. They haven't done much innovation wise in years. Its really sad.

linkmotif 8y ago

Does this affect mailgun? Is that a profitable revenue stream for them?

burlesona 8y ago
Mailgun spun off a while back and isn’t Rackspace anymore.
- linkmotif 8y ago
  Still thought it had the association some how.
  - Shakahs 8y ago
    Based on traceroutes and IP ownership Mailgun appears to have migrated mostly to AWS (web app, DNS, SMTP relay) but still uses some Rackspace infrastructure; emails delivered from my Mailgun account come from the Rackspace data center in Chicago.
    - linkmotif 8y ago
      Thank you

williesleg 8y ago

That graph is the best example of fake news in existence today. Why combine the cloud vendors like that? Obviously an agenda.

iandanforth 8y ago

Are these people under non-competes? I see a dozen customers for a competing (read: "clone") company with 'fanatical' support in the comments.

kazanz 8y ago
There are companies out there. I work at one of them, www.hivelocity.net. We provide the managed services and support everyone is talking about in 8 US cities. One of the primary reasons we are in business is the technical experts on staff that are constantly helping our clients, which is obviously expensive. I think the issue you don’t see “pop up” competitors is the inability to market “great support” empirically. There is a lemon market comment somewhere that is dead on. You can have all the high cost experts on staff but Everyone is going to think your marketing is full of it until they try your services or are referred via word of mouth.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

So the decline into Burst.Net territory has begun...

zeta0134 8y ago

I happen to work for Rackspace at the moment, and I'm really disappointed that I keep hearing about these things in the news first. Ever since we went private, all the upper management changed and we've kinda been kept in the dark, which is a big giant red flag. I think it might be time to polish up the old resume.

tyingq 8y ago
I would guess their planned exit is hoping IBM buys it to bolster marketshare for Bluemix/Softlayer. So, even if things go as planned, it's probably not anywhere you want to be long term :)
- pm90 8y ago
  IBM won't buy them. They just bought RedHat.
askafriend 8y ago
Don’t even think twice. Polish that resume and jump. The market is hot and life is short.
- redm 8y ago
  Uh, you should always think twice, the grass isn't always better on the other side and you know nothing more about his/her circumstances.
  - tedivm 8y ago
    We know he's working for a company where management doesn't communicate and layoffs are happening. Polishing off a resume doesn't mean immediately quitting either- it means going out to look at other opportunities. There are very few scenarios where being aware of other options is harmful.

bitzun 8y ago

I heard from someone inside that at least one office's developer reqs were all moved to India, inducing a pretty big morale hit.

exUKRacker 8y ago
All backfills and new support roles are going out to India and Mexico

ratling 8y ago

That company cannot implode fast enough. I will never do business with them again after they hell they put me through (twice) with their inherently broken security model Rest In Piss.

jimmywanger 8y ago

I used to work for rackspace. I'll answer any questions you might have, this was 2 years ago. My take is that they were pivoting HARD away from the server business and trying to provide "cloud architecture solutions", where they would tell you how to properly set up your GCP and Amazon clouds to fit your needs. From inside the company, coming from the silicon valley, the culture was rather jarring. They're from San Antonio, and try to hard to be hip and silicon valley-ish, but it's just in the uncanny valley where everything is a little bit... off. Also, it might be the corporate culture in San Antonio, but they try really hard to incoporate the new employees into "the family". For instance, all new employees have to get flown to San Antonio for a week of team building exercises and orientation. To me, it almost seemed culty.

orestis 8y ago
Any opinions on that cloud architecture solution service? Would you recommend it for a company with very little AWS experience?
- jpd- 8y ago
  Companies like you describe are the primary focus of Rackspace these days.
- alchemism 8y ago
  That ship has sailed, I’m afraid. Use AWS Lightsail for an equivalent and learn from the ground up.
- jimmywanger 8y ago
  Bear in mind they've only started this initiative about 2-3 years ago. 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.
- 8y ago

T3RMINATED 8y ago

Rackspace has not innovated since the 90s.

Sam_Harris 8y ago

Aren't they infamous for their spam support?

new_guy 8y ago

So they laid off 200 workers but they now have 200 job openings? Why not just retrain existing workers instead of laying them off? Stuff like this seems like the quickest way to kill morale and run the business into the ground.

raxthrow2022 8y ago
I had the same thought when I heard about this internally. Especially given that our company wishes to "retain the top tech talent" and "become/remain a destination employer". Morale is indeed quite low because of this :(
quacker 8y ago
Agreed but job openings in different areas most likely. Hypothetical example: you lay off 200 developers and want to hire 200 sales/marketing folks. Devs don't want to be retrained in marketing (I sure wouldn't). But, also consider that the PE firm doesn't care all that much. They just need to make the numbers look good, so they replace highly paid veterans for cheaper junior workers. And ultimately, they force the company into treading water with a smaller/cheaper workforce which makes the numbers look good in the short term so they can sell it. Sucks for the company though.

charliebrownau 8y ago

Wasnt rackspace one of the "woke" companies censoring people for what they hosted Another Go woke, go broke story

jimmydddd 8y ago

Are there any examples of companies bought by private equity firms that did not go down the drain? On the retail side, I recall Toys R Us and Sports Authority being examples of companies recently folding after the PE firms were enriched.