Rackspace will open trading this morning on the New York Stock Exchange with a share price that dropped nearly 25% on Thursday. The stock dropped after the company missed its earnings, raising concerns the cloud price wars with giants like Amazon Web Services are taking its toll. → Read More
Node.js is the everyman’s platform for developing apps. It’s JavaScript on the sever. It’s relatively easy to learn and it’s immensely popular. Now Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released the Node.js SDK for general availability. → Read More
Suddenly all this backend stuff is hot. Who would have ever thought that data pipes and the spigots would get so much attention? Salesforce is getting into the game and now so is Rackspace with the launch of its mobile push. Rackspace does not call its new offering backend as a service (BaaS). Instead they call it a “mobile-ready” stack that pre-packages the backend for developer so… → Read More
A federal judge has thrown out a patent claim against Rackspace, ruling that mathematical algorithms can’t be patented. The ruling in the Eastern Disrict stemmed from a 2012 complaint filed by Uniloc USA asserting that processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system was a patent violation. → Read More
Rackspace, one of the original participants in the OpenStack project, has spent the last couple of years building a successful cloud business. Along the way, they’ve continued to contribute to OpenStack and even offer a streamlined installation process for people who want to “run like Rackspace” on their own hardware. → Read More
Editor’s note: Chris Potter is co-founder of ScreenLight, a cloud video collaboration service for video producers to review and approve video with their teams and clients.
Google recently rolled out a number of enhancements to its Cloud Platform products. With these changes, it’s clear that Google is aiming its sights directly at Amazon Web Services and other IaaS providers, such as Windows… → Read More
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expected to earn $1.5 billion in revenues this year, but overall the organization still remains under-appreciated as a core asset of Amazon.com. But that may change this week as AWS holds its first conference in Las Vegas. The event should give more attention to an organization that has had arguably the deepest impact on IT and the enterprise software market. → Read More
Dreamhost has built a public cloud service called DreamCompute that is built on OpenStack, the open cloud infrastructure. The new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) shows how a federated, universal cloud will bind open and proprietary offerings to give customers a greater choice and enhance the value of the overall market. → Read More
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is the kind of service that Amazon Web Services (AWS) does so well. It automates the manual task of adding email to apps so developers can focus on doing what they do best. → Read More
PersonalWeb and Level 3 Communications have filed patent complaint against Rackspace for hosting GitHub. Update: PersonalWeb has a history of suing large tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Apple.
Update: Here’s Rackspace’s response. → Read More
In the beginning there was Amazon Simple Storage Service. And it was good. Soon after came Rackspace Cloud Files. And it was good. Today DreamHost is announcing their DreamObjects cloud storage solution to offer customers another hosted storage option.
DreamObjects storage is provided by Ceph, the distributed object store created by DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil. Ceph itself offers API… → Read More
Rackspace has acquired Mailgun, a San Francisco-based Y Combinator startup that has developed an API for creating and managing online email inboxes for apps and websites. It’s a concept that sounds simple on its face, but Mailgun’s ease of use and sophisticated routing can provide a number of new functionalities to web apps and web pages that is all done programatically. Terms of the deal were not… → Read More
During the great Amazon Web Services outages of April 2011 and June 2012 many users were stuck. They could, in theory, move their apps to another AWS region, or to another cloud provider altogether. But in practice the architecture of AWS regions are unique – each one supports slightly different features and APIs.
The thing is, every cloud provider will eventually have some downtime. Quite… → Read More
AppFog is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider that wants to do for developer platforms what Google did for GMail.
GMail launched in 2004 by giving its users a distributed service with 2 gigabytes (GB) of free disc space. Search made it possible. It disrupted competitors like Hotmail that provided a measly 2 mb of free space. → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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 … → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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