Rackspace to discontinue discounted services for open source projects

https://twitter.com/ericholscher/status/920396452307668992

by Sir_Cmpwn • 9 years ago

61 22 9 years ago

things must be getting bad at rackspace

Things seem to have gone downhill since the purchase last year - I remember they laid off a bunch of people earlier this year since they weren’t very profitable. Probably a maneuver to try and turn the money ship around.

GradysGhost2• 9 years ago

That layoff happened a couple months after upper management claimed there would be no layoffs.

pm902• 9 years ago

Yep. Luckily I left before the acquisition. Every single person in my (ex) 11 person team left for other opportunities, including managers. And it was a pretty awesome team :(.

Even the best recruiters left. I mean come on.

They're trying to be a support company for other cloud providers. I'm sure there is a market for that kind of service but not sure how much margin there is to be made.

I keep saying this but: if your company has been acquired by private equity firms, consider moving asap. Most of these firms will strip the company bare, cut expenses to the bone and try to sell the company to someone else for a profit. While this strategy may work very well for traditional manufacturing firms, I'm highly skeptical of software/tech companies.

Its a real shame. Rackspace had some of the best systems engineers I had worked with...

Chaebixi• 9 years ago

Most of these firms will strip the company bare, cut expenses to the bone and try to sell the company to someone else for a profit. While this strategy may work very well for traditional manufacturing firms, I'm highly skeptical of software/tech companies.

I don't think it works well for any industry. My understanding is private equity has a really bad track record of ruining the long term future of the business it touches. They're just skilled at getting the cash out and selling the business to a chump before things get bad.

GradysGhost2• 9 years ago

Same here. I left a few months before the acquisition. I found out about the acquisition through a news article, probably on Reddit, and I contacted a friend of mine still working in Support there about it. I had heard about it before he did, which is a strong indication of how bad (and, IMO, propagandistic) communication had become between the grunts, the revolving door of upper management, and the fat waistband of middle management.

stingraycharles• 9 years ago

They're trying to be a support company for other cloud providers. I'm sure there is a market for that kind of service but not sure how much margin there is to be made.

I’ve seen that happen at one more big dedicated/colo hosting provider. Once the cloud started catching on with enterprises, they couldn’t resist the consultancy money of helping them in the migrations, and now they’re stuck being dependent on those types of contracts.

It takes a strong spine to resist this type of money, but when you do, make sure to invest it wisely.

CM30• 9 years ago

I keep saying this but: if your company has been acquired by private equity firms, consider moving asap. Most of these firms will strip the company bare, cut expenses to the bone and try to sell the company to someone else for a profit. While this strategy may work very well for traditional manufacturing firms, I'm highly skeptical of software/tech companies.

For anyone in a web hosting role, I suspect the same would probably apply if EIG bought the company. Those guys have a pretty lengthy record of buying out successful hosting companies and driving them into the ground.

https://researchasahobby.com/full-list-eig-hosting-companies...

bdcravens2• 9 years ago

I can't speak to how the company is doing, but I think the move to focus less on their own cloud offering to AWS support/management is quite telling.

fniephaus• 9 years ago

Are there any good comparable alternatives?

calavera• 9 years ago

Hi, CTO of Netlify here,

let us know if you need any help moving out docs, websites or any other web property from there, we'll be super happy to help. Projects like Kubernetes, Docker and React are already using our free offering for Open Source.

masklinn• 9 years ago

FWIW ReadTheDocs is probably looking for a new host, though they're a… substantial system:

https://readthedocs.org/sustainability/

Serve over 20 million pages of documentation a month
Have 10 servers and serve over 2 TB of documentation a month
Host over 18,000 projects and support 25,000 users
Are supported by two dedicated engineers

agj• 9 years ago

Correct, Read the Docs isn't going away, and maintainers certainly don't need to worry about moving their documentation. We'll just be switching hosts before the end of the year.

We actually got hints of the fact that Rackspace was axing their F/OSS program back in May, and have been slowly prodding folks in the Python community about sponsoring hosting since then. Rackspace never confirmed if/when the program was going away, but we were anticipating this since their acquisition.

davidkuhta• 9 years ago

PSA for others potentially looking for an off-the-rack solution, here were some of the companies mentioned:

Netlify - See CTO comment above/below https://www.netlify.com/open-source/ [Kubernetes, Docker, React]

BlueHost - https://www.bluehost.com/open-source [Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, phpBB, among 80 others]

Linode - https://www.linode.com/sponsorships [23 companies listed]

UpCloud https://www.upcloud.com/pricelist/ (Didn't see an explicit mention of open source projects, but 'Custom' plans exist)

Oregon State University Open Source Lab - http://osuosl.org/ [Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation and Drupal]

OVH - https://www.ovh.com/us/hosting.xml (Didn't see an explicit mention of open source projects)

DigitalOcean - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-there-a-...

vexxhost - https://vexxhost.com/ (Didn't see an explicit mention of open source projects)

Disclaimer: I'm not commercially affiliated with an of these (nor are any of the links 'sponsored'), although I have utilized some of these companies for hosting.

zeveb• 9 years ago

For some reason I'm reminded of https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

kapauldo• 9 years ago

How is Rackspace still in business?

ramereth• 9 years ago

Director of the OSUOSL here.

We can certainly help as many projects as we can that are impacted by this. Situations like this is why we are still important today despite all the in-kind public cloud services projects can get. We provide a neutral hosting environment supported by various sponsorships (we can always use more!)

Rackspace to discontinue discounted services for open source projects

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