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).
As part of today’s annoucement Rackspace also announced a partnership with CDN Limelight Networks to help distribute data as part of its Cloud Files service, and an agreement with Sonian to offer archiving for its Mailtrust Email service.
The additions help strengthen Rackspace’s cloud based services, collectively called Mosso, which the company launched in February.
This is all good news for developers. Amazon has been the dominant force in this space for some time, and competition will only decrease prices and (hopefully) lead to an arms race in features, stability, and performance.
Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser.
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“could based” services?
Slicehost is an awesome host… we use a couple of their boxes. They are cheaper than Amazon at a couple of server levels and just as fast.
Will we now be able to pay a flat monthly fee instead of .15 per GB?
Is there a difference between slices on slicehost and VPS?
Looking at their home page, a 1GB slice is the roughly the same price as an Amazon small instance. You get less memory but 400GB bandwidth is included.
If they’re like a VPS, you have the advantage of not having to jump through hoops because the disk space is volatile as it is on EC2.
On the other hand, EC2’s big advantage is the ease of launching a new image. You can bring machines up and down easily which is very powerful.
And you can, like we do, provide a pre-configured AMI that works out of the box.
EC2 is awesome, but competition is good.
Any idea how much was purchased by each? JungleDisk is a great application! Congrats to Dave!
I use slicehost and love them. I sure hope that this doesn’t change the way slicehost works in any way, unless they decide to lower the monthly price…
The ads to the right of techcrunch is annoying, how do I remove?
Use firefox 3.0 with the adblock plugin. Now back to your thread…
Slicehost is awesome: look how fast my slice loads: http://www.skyrocket.me
I hope their product doesn’t change too much; fingers crossed they won’t go the same way as Textdrive did with Joyent and add a load of burdensome features.
Wow, you would have guessed that you are an “online marketer”. Nice way to get visitors to waste their time visiting your shitty WordPress website.
Heh, I did a trace and the site isn’t even hosted at Slicehost.
Provide a little proof before you accuse him of spamming
skyrocket.me. 86400 IN A 208.75.86.101
Slicehost LLC SLICEHOST-208-75-86-0-24 (NET-208-75-86-0-1)
208.75.86.0 - 208.75.86.255
Drew - you rock. Wish there were more commenters like you
I am a slicehost user as well and I love them. I use them for a number of my projects and couldn’t be happier. Hopefully nothing changes with this acquisition!
So RackSpace owns Mosso and Slicehost. Sounds a little redundant, no?
Mosso isn’t OS level, it’s an application stack more like AppEngine but you can deploy normal LAMP or .NET apps instead of having to code in Google Python. Slicehost adds different capabilities.
mosso also charges based on compute cycle usage.
Wow, seem to be a lot of fancy terms and such being thrown around to describe what’s quite simple: Mosso is an expensive shared host that gives you no real access to the server itself, whereas SliceHost is comparable to a dedicated server and you have complete access.
I’m not even sure why people are describing SliceHost as a direct competitor of Amazon’s. If anything, SliceHost is competing with the other dozens of VPS providers out there who offer exactly the same thing (a ’slice’ of a dedicated server is hardly something exclusive to SliceHost).
In fact, Media Temple’s (dv) servers are essentially VPS servers. To analogise with Media Temple since lots of people are familiar with them, Mosso is Grid Server and SliceHost is the Dedicated-Virtual.
Great company with a great service. Been using these guys for over a year. Best hosting services so far. PickledOnion rocks!
Slicehost is great, reliable and cheap. We use them for friendbinder. I hope this acquisition doesn’t change that.
Slicehost is great, we have been running http://www.edmodo.com on it without a hitch, i don’t plan on changing any time soon either. Congrats, hopefully rackspace doesn’t corrupt you!!!
Cool, looks like some people over at Rackspace were listening to their customers after all. Look for the Slicehost guys to deploy their tech down in the Texas data centers. Mosso will then come out with some virtual node options to coordinate with some of the shared infrastructure already built into Mosso.
From a Slicehost perspective look to see hardware load balancers, and infinite SAN storage volumes to be available in the Texas offerings.
Maybe they will buy a CDN like SimpleCDN or PantherExpress to round things out. Now that they are public looks like they are ready to start leading in the industry again. Good job.
wow congrats to jungledisk and slicehost! I use both of these services and have been very pleased with them
I just hope slicehost is going remain cool and geeky.
I can say with certainity that Slicehost kicks arse. Viva la Slicehost.
Rhinofile - http://www.rhinofile.com - uses slices or VPS’s to handle the client portion to host the large files and send any emails.
We have used them for the past year for different things, hosting for the website plus testing of the Rhinofile client. Works a treat. Their forums have a lot of helpful and intelligent people.
Congrats to jungledisk, really good setup/design. One of my favourites.
Nicel done I think Nicely done.
Jiff
http://www.online-privacy.cz.tc
Slicehost is not a direct competitor to EC2.
EC2 essentially offers CPU time in “the cloud” allowing you to start and stop VPS instances to meet demand. This is not best suited to web hosting due to the volatile storage.
Slicehost offers you a VPS hosted on one of there many servers, This is not a “cloud” based service, though it is a direct competitor to people like http://www.linode.com/
You need to revisit the EC2 options - you can now get persistent storage (Elastic Block Store)
I use Jungle Disk and I’m hoping the acquisition doesn’t interfere with their great product.
I use Linode VPS and it works great. Does Slicehost have any advantages over Linode?
One very large advantage: they were good enough for Rackspace to acquire - Linode wasn’t.
I am a pro slicehost user for quite a few years…I always love their service and I hope nothing is gonna affected with this acquistion…
Linode does seem to be a very close competitor to slicehost and linode are fair amount cheaper. Linode doesn’t have a backup option like slicehost does though.
(I’m a slicehost user)
What differentiates Amazon’s EC2 from a VPS?
Two things:
- Rapid provisioning accessible via API
- Utility billing model
That’s all folks. There’s no magic involved here.
EC2 is using Xen just like all the others. API access can be bolted on if it doesn’t exist already. With some development efforts layered on top of the service they just acquired, they then have product that competes directly with EC2.
What’s missing here is some sort of EBS alternative. If they get that in place then it’s game on.
nice
Lots of companies are starting to do this, a good one in Europe is Gandi, http://www.gandi.net/hosting/. Slicehost/Gandi are definitely different from EC2 at the moment (e.g. you don’t duplicate VPS servers), but I suspect they both will head that way more in the future. They also come from a reliability/paid service background rather than Amazon who haven’t been able to guarantee SLAs, so I’d rather go with one of these guys who are used to hosting business critical systems for customers.
Most of you haven’t understand anything.
Slicehost is not a competitor of Amazon EC2. Slicehost is just a VPS provider (there are thousands of them) with a 2.0 feeling, nothing more. You can learn what a VPS is on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V.....ate_server
The reason to buy Slicehost are that they use Xen (most VPS providers use Parallel’s Virtuozzo technology) and the huge growth they have had.
In the other hand EC2 is an hight availability VPS provider, which means that all infraestructure is virtualized (storage is on a different server), redundant (if the server hosting your VPS goes down, your VPS won’t go down) and are using load balancers.
I believe that is exactly what slicehost and Gandi.net offer, Xen hosting on a high availability cloud infrastructure, which is exactly why they are more interesting than the VPS crowd who all use Virtuozzo (which with the way they pack ’shells’ onto boxes is pretty much like shared hosting with more lower level control). That’s why they’re interesting to buy, the technology is better.
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Wow they can now compete for business in the cloud … that is non-existent.
EC2 essentially offers CPU time in “the cloud” allowing you to start and stop VPS instances to meet demand. This is not best suited to web hosting due to the volatile storage.