Rumors have been flying for over a week that Rackspace was for sale, but today instead of the whole kit and kaboodle, the company announced it was selling its Cloud Sites web hosting unit to Liquid Web.
The fact that Liquid Web is itself a cloud web hosting company would seem to make the two a perfect match, allowing the company to expand its business through acquisition.
The two companies actually share a common marketing story around devoted customer support, and it is this element that Liquid Web believes will differentiate it from the rest of the web-hosting pack moving forward.
“Unfortunately, our industry is trending toward unsupported services, which leaves fast-growing developers, digital agencies and designers alone, without a real person to turn to when they really need help,” Liquid Web CEO Jim Geiger said in a statement.
The company press release announcing the purchase is peppered with the phrase “delighting the customer,” and with Rackspace’s Cloud Sites property in the fold, it believes it can extend that mission.
With Cloud Sites, Liquid Web will now support several popular hosting platforms including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, .NET, PHP and other development and production environments
Liquid Web promises that it will keep the entire Cloud Sites unit intact in San Antonio, TX where it’s based, and that creative customers who have been using Cloud Sites should get a smooth transition to the new owners. In fact, Liquid Web is promising to expand Cloud Sites moving forward.
It all sounds just terrific, but as we’ve learned, with any acquisition the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Over the next several months, Cloud Sites employees and its customers will learn first-hand how smoothly the transition will truly go.
As for the remainder of Rackspace, there is every indication that a deal could happen, perhaps soon, but for now that part remains in limbo until we hear further.