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Rackspace To Shut Down Slicehost

Rackspace Hosting is shutting down its Slicehost service within the next 12 months, the company said in a letter to customers.

Acquired by Rackspace in 2008, Slicehost is a managed hosting provider that Rackspace maintained as a separate business unit. The move is likely to be unwelcome news to those who must migrate from the Slicehost service.

"With two brands, two control panels and two sets of support, engineering and operations teams, it has been a challenge to keep development parity between the products," wrote Mark Interrante, Rackspace VP of product.

The company's emphasis on its OpenStack open source project and the need to convert to IPv6 are the two primary reasons the company has decided to shut down Slicehost. Rackspace plans to convert all Slicehost accounts to Cloud Servers over the next year.

By making the conversion to Rackspace Cloud Servers accounts, the company said that customers will be better positioned for IPv6 and have access to Cloud Files, the Cloud Files content delivery network and the recently released Cloud Load Balancers.

"Naturally, this decision has not been easy," Interrante said. "There has been extensive planning, and will continue to be more, to ensure this change is as seamless as possible for everyone."

Following the company's announcement, Interrante posted a detailed Q&A outlining the transition, and Rackspace's rationale for shutting down Slicehost. "We truly believe this change will be in the best interest of Slicehost customers over the long term," he said. "A big reason we purchased Slicehost was to learn from their technology and their customers so we could build up the Rackspace Cloud solutions to the Slicehost level of excellence. We want to retain or improve your product experience, not make it worse."

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 04, 2011


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