Hosting company Rackspace is acquiring Y Combinator-backed startup Cloudkick, which offers a full-fledged server management system to businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cloudkick, which launched in early 2009, provides detailed graphs on the health of your servers, and tools to categorize and keep information about what each server is doing. Cloudkick serves more than 1,500 businesses from Fortune 500
enterprises to small startup and has seen more than 1 million servers pass through its tools. → Read More
Surely by now you’ve heard of the Dove World Outreach Center, the Florida church that plans to hold a “Koran burning day” on September 11, the nine year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Pretty much nobody think it’s a good idea, from Palin to Obama, from Gen. Petraeus to the FBI. Now involved: Rackspace. Yes, the popular Web host has pulled the plug on the church’s Web site, citing a violation in its service’s “hate-speech provision of [its] acceptable-use policy.” → Read More
Another day, another Rackspace outage. The hosting company had a complete and total failure today that took down a number of big sites on the Internet, including ours. This has been happening all too often in recent months, including downtime just last month.
The failure apparently originated in the company’s Dallas-area server farm. But unlike previous times, this does not appear to be a power issue, the company says. Some other sites that are currently affected include: 37signals, Brizzly, Scoble’s blog, all of the sites hosted by Laughing Squid, Tumblr custom domains. → Read More
Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology–offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email.
A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly–while keeping all their emails–due to the capabilities of LiveOffice’s products. → Read More
A large number of customers of Rackspace Cloud, including Techcrunch, have been experiencing downtime for the past 1h 20m or so. The status blog reports that the service was degraded, and other reports state that it is due to a power outage at the Dallas network operations center. Customers of both Rackspace Cloud and Slicehost are affected, putting services such as Posterous, Dailybooth and others out of commission. → Read More
When Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff launched his CRM platform in the cloud in 1999, he embarked on a “No Software” campaign to tout his “Software as a Service” agenda. Today, hosting service Rackspace is promoting a similar campaign with the launch of NoMoreServers.com, a site dedicated to the emergence of Computing-as-a-Service models (like hosting, cloud computing and SaaS) to power enterprise IT.
NoMoreServers.com is a rally cry of the computing-as-a-service era. The site seeks to empower businesses to acknowledge the decline of in-house computing and the rise of the All Cloud Enterprise (ACE). Covering hosting, cloud computing, SaaS, and the key vendors driving them (eg: Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Salesforce, etc), NoMoreServers.com will feature daily commentary explaining all things cloud computing. The site will include third-party content and news about hosting, cloud computing and will have a live community portal for visitors to engage on the topic of outsourcing computing. → Read More
Rackspace is open-sourcing the specs for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license, enabling third-party developers to copy, implement and rehash them as they see fit.
In addition, The Rackspace Cloud (formerly known as Mosso) has made available Cloud Files language bindings along with technical guidelines for Java, PHP, Python, C# and Ruby under the MIT license through GitHub. Rackspace aims to offer a reference implementation in Python soon and in a press release casually mentions it “is aware of Ruby, Perl, Java, and Twisted Python Cloud Servers bindings”, which are all in the process of being developed. → Read More
As much of the web seemed to notice this morning, several sites running on Rackspace’s servers went down. Yes, again.
For the second time in 8 days, a power outage interrupted service at one of its data centers. And again it was the Dallas center that was effected. This time however, Rackspace was able to get things up and running fairly quickly, and more importantly, communicated well through its blog and Twitter throughout the downtime.
Still, it raises the question, why do power outages keep taking down a service that so many rely on? They have backups in place, so what’s going on? → Read More
As many of you know, a lot of the sites that use Rackspace as their hosting provider were down for about an hour yesterday. That’s because Rackspace went down. Apparently, it was a power outage at a data center that caused it, an incident report that we’ve obtained explains.
While Rackspace has backup systems in place, a series of events apparently caused those backups to fail, resulting in the servers going down. Here’s the key nugget: → Read More
Last week, Michael Jackson’s death caused sites to fail left and right. Today, it’s a very different problem. The hosting service Rackspace has been completely down for the past 30 minutes or so. Don’t believe us, just listen to Justin Timberlake or Michelle Malkin, both of which have sites on the service and took to Twitter to complain.
Apparently, it’s an entire network outage and so the usually very responsive Rackspace team cannot even respond to emails or tweet (though I’m sure we’ll be seeing some updates from smartphones shortly). Along with sites like Timberlake’s and Malkin’s, the popular event site, EventBrite, is apparently down as well. → Read More
Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.
Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.”
The other refreshing feature of the app is its move away from email inbox-style unread counts. As a long-time Google Reader user, I always dreaded the experience of returning from an offline vacation only to find several thousand unread items in my reader. With Fever, the emphasis is on dividing subscriptions into two camps: must-reads (called Kindling) and everything else (Sparks). By moving the “hit-or-miss” feeds into the Sparks bin, Fever ensures that a user gets only the most relevant content. → Read More
Our roundtable on cloud computing is coming up next week. (Get tickets here via Eventbrite: $75 each based on availability). In addition to the previously announced speakers, I am happy to announce a few more very special participants: Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, and Jon Engates, CTO of Rackspace. Below is the complete list of Roundtable Participants
Roundtable Discussion
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Roundtable Moderators:
Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT
The roundtable will be preceded by five cloud computing enterprise product demos which will be evaluated by a panel of judges TechCrunch50-style.
There will also be a networking party afterward where more companies will be giving product demos. We couldn’t do this without our sponsors Microsoft and Ribbit. To find out about how to become a sponsor or get a demo table please email Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde. (More after the jump). → Read More
Cloud computing keeps advancing like rolling thunder. Amazon today announced a major upgrade to its EC2 compute cloud service and Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim has decided to spend more time at his startup Arista Networks, which sells 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at handling the loads at cloud-computing data centers. And just yesterday, RackSpace announced two small acquisitions to help it better compete against Amazon in the cloud computing as well. The biggest news today comes from Amazon, which is staking the “beta” label off of its EC2 service and announcing the following upgrades: Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone. There’s now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2. Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2. Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2. We plan to release an interactive AWS management console. We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains how Amazon’s Web Services are becoming more capable every day and makes a good case that if the economy goes down, the pay-as-you-go cloud computing model will find more takers among major enterprises. These moves to strengthen EC2 (offering service-level guarantees, load balancing, monitoring, and support for instances of Microsoft Windows and SQL Server) are steps aimed at appeasing Big IT—the IT managers who run big corporate data centers and still need convincing that they won’t get fired for offloading their corporate computation needs to the Web. But this is where the winds are blowing. If you want to know what’s next in IT, all you need to do is follow Andy Bechtolsheim. One of the original founders of Sun Microsystems, who then moved on to found several other startups including Granite Systems, he became a bigwig at Cisco after it acquired Granite, and then returned to Sun to help save it from extinction. Now he is turning his attention to Arista (renamed today from Arastra), where he is chairman and chief development officer. The New York Times and others reported that he is leaving Sun, but he is in fact still staying there part-time helping them come up with next gen products including X64 and storage servers. GigaOm more details. Arista’s 20-Gigabit switches are geared towards cloud computing data centers with tens or hundreds of of thousands of servers and throughput needs that run up to 100 → Read More
Web hosting provider Rackspace has acquired JungleDisk, an online backup service, and Virtual Machine provider Slicehost in a deal designed to help bolster its offerings against top competitor Amazon Web Services. The announced acquisition price is $11.5 million in cash and stock, with the possibility of up to an additional $16.5 million depending on performance.
Jungle Disk is a file storage and backup service that up until now has relied on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). With the new announcement the company says that it will begin offering the service using Rackspace’s similar service Cloud Files, but will continue to support storage using Amazon with plans to support even more services in the future.
Slicehost offers developers “slices” in Xen-based virtual servers that are much cheaper and generally easier to use than a traditional dedicated server. The service is a direct competitor to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). → Read More
After filing for an IPO last April in which it hoped to raise $400 million, Web hosting provider (and cloud-computing aspirant) Rackspace finally priced its IPO last night at $12.50 a share. That would have brought in $187.5 million, or half what it was hoping for. But it opened this morning at $10 (ticker: RAX). It’s been been going up since then to about $11. And Rackspace is a solid company financially. But in this market, any IPO is a sign of hope (there were no VC-backed IPOs last quarter). Rackspace backed off from an IPO once before, in 2000. It’s been champing at the bit to go public for a long time. It looks like the shares are trading up. Let’s see where they end the day. (Disclosure Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). Update: Rackspace ended its first day of trading at the same price where it opened: $10. Not a confidence builder for other IPO-aspirants. CrunchBase Information Rackspace Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Web hosting provider Rackspace filed for an initial public offering with the SEC last night, as we predicted it would. The company will try to raise $400 million, and it intends to set the IPO price through an auction, much like Google did. The underwriters are Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and WR Hambrecht & Co. (the leading proponent of such IPO pricing). Pricing through an auction is designed to make sure the company raises the most money possible instead of giving up a first-day pop to investors who are allocated shares by the investment banks doing the deal. Shares will still be allocated to such clients, but anyone who bids beforehand in the auction at or above the eventual IPO price will also get shares. All in all, it is a much more efficient way to price an IPO and more companies should do it. With the filing we also get a clearer picture of Rackspace’s business and financials. Its revenues grew 62 percent last year to $362 million, but it posted net profits of $17.8 million, which were down 10 percent from the year before. Cash flows from operations, though, remained healthy at $105 million last year, up from $61 million in 2006. (Click on the table below for a bigger image and more data): The decline in profits was because the company spent a lot more staffing up and spending more on sales and marketing. About half of the $53 million increase in its cost of revenues last year was attributable to the fact that it nearly doubled the number of employees to 2,021 (of that, data center employees went from 576 to 994, and sales and marketing headcount went from 224 to 353). Servers, software licensing costs, bandwidth, power and rent made up most of the rest of the increase. Another interesting tidbit: that truck accident that took down one of its data centers in Texas last November cost the company $3.4 million in credits to customers. At the end of the year, it had 29,193 customers, compared to 12,677 the year before. But nearly all of that growth was due to its acquisition of Webmail.us (i.e., they are hosted e-mail customers, not hosted Website customers). Rackspace has 36,692 servers across seven data centers, 114,749 square feet of data center space, with a 61 percent utilization rate. The company makes $3,504 a year per square → Read More
The last time Web hosting provider Rackspace filed for an IPO was back in March, 2000, at the peak of the first Internet bubble. Now, it may be about to do so again. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow or Monday, according to one tipster who tells us that email to that effect are circulating inside the company. (Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser, but our source is not an employee). There are no filings yet with the SEC, but press releases touting its revenues have mysteriously been stripped from the company’s site. Here is one that’s been cached, announcing 2006 revenues of $224 million. Various reports put quarterly revenues for 2007 at $75 million, $84 million, and $96 million, respectively for each of the first three quarters, which suggests that full-year 2007 revenues were north of $350 million. Rackspace claims to be profitable, and has more than 15,000 customers. A major outage last November caused by a traffic accident near its Dallas data center was noticed across the Web. Rumors of an IPO have been swirling recently. The company just hired a new chief financial officer on March 31. Last October, it acquired Webmail.us and it offers cloud computing services that compete with Amazon’s Web Services through its Mosso brand. In January, it shifted strategyto emphasize its utility computing business model. It is time to pull the trigger. → Read More
Last week’s incident with Amazon Web Services briefly going down may have raised questions about the reliability of cloud computing, but demand is high enough for competitors to keep trying to get into the game. The more companies that enter this space, the cheaper and more competitive that Web-scale computing should become. Today, hosting provider Rackspace is offering a new cloud computing service through its subsidiary Mosso. (Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). The service competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), although it doesn’t require any load balancing or other administration. It also competes with Joyent and Media Temple’s Grid Service. Pricing starts at $100 a month for: —50 GB of storage —500 GB of bandwidth for transferring data —3 million HTTP requests. From there additional capacity per month costs: —$0.50/GB of storage —$0.25/GB of bandwidth —$0.03/1,000 HTTP requests This is a bit more expensive than Amazon (which charges in a different way) but a lot cheaper than the $350 to $400 a month Rackspace charges to host a dedicated server for a Website. Mosso bills itself as a Web app hosting service. Applications are hosted on redundant server clusters (although the data center is only in one location, so something could take the whole thing out—like, say, if a truck were to run into a nearby power transformer). Coders choose what technology stack they want their apps to run on and upload their code. Mosso supports both Windows and Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Perl, Python, MySQL, and SQL Server. (Amazon, in contrast, does not support Windows). Mosso does not yet support Java applications, but it is working on that. The company actually has been testing the service for nearly two years and already runs 37,000 apps. → Read More
37Signals is having a bad morning, according to their current home page image above. They’re pointing fingers at their service provider, which was (and we believe still is) Rackspace. Last November they suffered a three hour outage along with other Rackspace customers. Update: It’s back up, total outage was about 2 hours. Per the comments, 37Signals doesn’t seem super duper happy with Rackspace these days. → Read More
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