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CenturyLink Said to Seek to Acquire Rackspace Hosting
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- hkmurakami 12y agoTotally 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 12y agoCenturyLink has a surprising amount of open source, especially around Docker and CoreOS: https://github.com/CenturyLinkLabs https://github.com/CenturyLinkLabs
- walterbell 12y agoLooks like this was released in August: http://panamax.io http://panamax.io
- unethical_ban 12y ago> 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 12y agoYou realize Rackspace doesn't compete with Digital Ocean?
- ceejayoz 12y agoSure they do. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/
- ckuehl 12y agoOne 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/ http://www.rackspace.com/managed-cloud/
- davidgerard 12y agoNo, 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 12y agoCan you enumerate any of those ways?
- patio11 12y agoWell that's my daily dose of humility: a company with $20 billion a year in revenue that I had never heard of.
- ejr 12y agoThey've been a provider for other providers so their presence has been masked a bit. Many smaller, regional, ISPs frequently resell through them.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- fuzzythinker 12y agoSame here, until they acquired Appfog (phpfog) last year.
- nknighthb 12y agoThey 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.
- Raphael 12y agoCenturyLink— Formerly CenturyTel and Qwest, formerly US West.
- tehwebguy 12y agoAlso merged with Embarq, which was previously Sprint's local arm.
- bmelton 12y agoAlso, 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CenturyLink_Field
- 12y ago
- mrbill 12y agoI've heard nothing good about CenturyLink. People I know who have them as a provider almost universally hate it.
- walterbell 12y agoDoes anyone like their cable company? How do they compare to Comcast, Time-Warner, Cablevision?
- gsoltis 12y agoOne 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 12y agoYes, we need more regional examples like the Bay Area's sonic, with a decade-plus track record of survival and quality.
- eip 12y agoI 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.
- tracker1 12y agoI'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.
- mzr 12y agoThey 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.
- relaxitup 12y agoIirc they also acquired the paas provider AppFog in 2013.
- cardmagic 12y agoThey did. I am the founder of AppFog. CenturyLink has treated me great.
- hayksaakian 12y agowhat's the high level plan for AppFog?
- superuser2 12y agoCenturyLink'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.
- pyre 12y agoI ended up a CenturyLink customer with the Qwest merger.
- irq 12y agoAnd 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 12y agoAye, 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 12y agoI pay $75 a month for wireless 6mbs and 90ms ping times to google..
- zupreme 12y agoCL is a major player in the corporate market. We have set many clients in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan up with CL fiber and EoC. Almost universally CL is the most reliable of the available connections in our redundant connection scenarios. We track uptime historically for all managed clients and I can state definitively that CL almost never goes down during business hours. I do see a common occurence of them hiccuping around 3am for a minute or so, which I have to attribute to them pushing router updates or something similar, but otherwise its very solid service.
- oldbuzzard 12y agoYeah... 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 ;)