CenturyLink Said to Seek to Acquire Rackspace Hosting

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-07/centurylink-said-to-seek-to-acquire-rackspace-hosting.html

by antr • 12 years ago

77 51 12 years ago

hkmurakami• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

CenturyLink has a surprising amount of open source, especially around Docker and CoreOS: https://github.com/CenturyLinkLabs

walterbell3• 12 years ago

Looks like this was released in August: http://panamax.io

unethical_ban2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

You realize Rackspace doesn't compete with Digital Ocean?

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Sure they do. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/

davidgerard3• 12 years ago

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.)

unethical_ban2• 12 years ago

RAX is more full-service, sure, but it seems the market isn't as sustainable there.

DoubleMalt• 12 years ago

Of course they do. In the sense that a smartphone app competes with a printed book.

While they are completely different things, for many users in many circumstances they are substitutes.

I worked for a startup that got into the rackspace program and had several thousand $/month free in rackspace services. The same amount of raw power on DO would have cost 200$/month, but a couple of 20$/month DO VMs would have been ample.

And for prototyping you usually don't need anything more sophisticated than a VM (or a free heroku account for that matter ...)

AJ007• 12 years ago

Rackspace Cloud does. We switched.

patio11• 12 years ago

Well that's my daily dose of humility: a company with $20 billion a year in revenue that I had never heard of.

ejr• 12 years ago

They've been a provider for other providers so their presence has been masked a bit. Many smaller, regional, ISPs frequently resell through them.

fuzzythinker• 12 years ago

Same here, until they acquired Appfog (phpfog) last year.

nknighthb• 12 years ago

They 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• 12 years ago

CenturyLink— Formerly CenturyTel and Qwest, formerly US West.

tehwebguy• 12 years ago

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

bmelton• 12 years ago

Also, 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

falcolas• 12 years ago

And US West spawned out of Ma' Bell.

mrbill• 12 years ago

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

walterbell3• 12 years ago

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

gsoltis• 12 years ago

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.

eip• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

I'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• 12 years ago

They 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.

sxcurry• 12 years ago

Maybe an outlier, but they are providing 12mbs service to my rural home in S. Oregon, and 40mbs fiber service to my apartment in Portland. Both work great and are very reliable.

HelloMcFly• 12 years ago

They sponsor a nice stadium in Seattle.

icelancer• 12 years ago

Count me in the anecdata column against that. I have Comcast at home which disconnects 6 times per day for 5-30 minutes per session and they refuse to believe it is their fault (constant ranging response timeouts on two DOCSIS modems says otherwise) and CenturyLink at work is up 24/7 with only one restart of the modem needed in the last 12 months with consistent 30/30 bandwidth for $50/month.

CenturyLink doesn't serve my home with anything better than 6/1 service otherwise I'd use them. Thank god for regional monopolies.

uxp• 12 years ago

I'll be happy to provide my name in the against column. I used to subscribe to an ADSL service starting about a decade ago through a local ISP, but I was required to lease the copper connection through Qwest which was acquired by CenturyLink. I could always tell when someone new moved into the neighborhood and signed up with CenturyLink because the technician would always climb up the pole and disconnect me in order to hook up their line. That's not to say that my speeds weren't great (was paying for 7/1, which is what I received), but the cost on the leased line was extraordinary. By the time I canceled the monthly bill for a dead phone line to my ISP climbed from about $25 to $60, still for 7/1 service.

I only switched to Comcast at home last year because it was 2013 and 1Mbit upload speeds for the price I was paying was ridiculous. At least with Comcast I know how to play the "the cost is too high, do you have any special offers this month?" game. They've been just as consistent, without the physical disconnects.

Fuzzwah• 12 years ago

They've been my ISP for 2 years. No problems at all. I haven't had to use support, so I can't speak to that side of things. Connection has been solid though.

Moral_• 12 years ago

I have CenturyLink in Salt Lake City. I get 60Mbps down 20mbps up for 35$ a month. My SNR is great and my line attentuation is great. I haven't had a single issue with CL. Perhaps the service is good as Google Fiber is coming.

cdr• 12 years ago

They're OK in cities where they have enough competition to make them invest in infrastructure. They're effing terrible if you're somewhere there's not enough competition for them to ever invest in infrastructure. My customer service experiences with them have also been terrible - incompetent CSRs, clueless techs.

Basically like any megaprovider, they only do as much as competition forces them to.

relaxitup• 12 years ago

Iirc they also acquired the paas provider AppFog in 2013.

cardmagic• 12 years ago

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

hayksaakian• 12 years ago

what's the high level plan for AppFog?

superuser2• 12 years ago

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.

pyre• 12 years ago

I ended up a CenturyLink customer with the Qwest merger.

irq• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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)

oldbuzzard• 12 years ago

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 ;)

CenturyLink Said to Seek to Acquire Rackspace Hosting

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