Rackspace Hosting makes two acquisitions

Correction: The month of the company's IPO has been fixed.

Rackspace Hosting, flush with cash post IPO, announced Thursday it has acquired two companies as part of a retooled cloud hosting strategy.

Rackspace, a hosting services provider based in San Antonio, Texas, snapped up Xen-based virtual machine hosting company Slicehost and cloud storage company Jungle Disk. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

"Cloud computing offers tremendous benefits to our customers that complement our traditional managed hosting services," Lanham Napier, Rackspace Hosting CEO, said in a statement.

With the acquisitions and deeper dive into cloud computing, Rackspace plans to integrate their technology into its hosting portfolio over time. Jungle Disk's technology allows customers to share an unlimited volume of cloud storage between multiple users through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup. Slicehost's technology provides on-demand, virtualized servers.

While Rackspace's success in cloud computing has yet to be seen, it is one of the rare companies that has managed to go public in the second half of the year as the economy has started tanking. The company raised $187.5 million and priced its IPO at $12.50 a share.

Since its August debut on the New York Stock Exchange, its shares have fallen to $5.

[JimmyT--2008]

If their cloud services uptime matches their hosted exchange uptime, Amazon has nothing to worry about.

[jesdon]

I have heard nothing but good things from other webmasters about their Cloud hosting services so I would not be to surprised by their success, it is very exciting server technology, though I still like Media Temples grid server.<br />
________________________________________<br />
jesdon
<br /><a href="http://realestatelicensedirect.com">real estate license training</a>

[Michael_Sheehan]

For another Cloud Computing vendor's perspective on the recent Amazon and Rackspace announcements, please view this post: http://blog.gogrid.com/2008/10/23/analysis-of-recent-cloud-announcements-rackspace-amazon/

-Michael Sheehan
Technology Evangelist for GoGrid