Rackspace raises email hosting prices by as much as 706 percent
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The base plan for $10 lists a 25GB mailbox. That's HUGE. If storage is the bottleneck, I wonder why they can't offer more typical mailbox sizes (1GB or 5GB or something) for a lower price, and then up-charge for additional storage.
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That sounds grossly ignorant of what brownshirts actually are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
Unfortunately, we're getting close to making actual browshirts great again in some countries.
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<gestures over America>
Pretty sure the brownshirts literally doing door-to-door raids asking for papers are the brownshirts of our era, but soulless marketing is definitely a close second.
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If you didn't run from Rackspace after their Exchange hack Meltdown. Your organization deserves this.
I only had them around because they had an Exchange / Linux Mail solution. Where i could use POP3/IMAP. As Microsoft365 cut off all POP3/IMAP accounts ages ago. But I eventually had to move M365 for Exchange and figured out another domain to use POP3/IMAP with a separate host.
I only had them around because they had an Exchange / Linux Mail solution. Where i could use POP3/IMAP. As Microsoft365 cut off all POP3/IMAP accounts ages ago. But I eventually had to move M365 for Exchange and figured out another domain to use POP3/IMAP with a separate host.
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There were PE's a long long time ago. They went public again after they extracted everything they could and went public again to try to milk whatever they could out of the public.
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There are providers that charge as little as $10/year for email hosting (without hard limits of any kind, and soft limits so high even Microsoft wouldn't reach them). They absolutely DO NOT exist in a vacuum.
Decades ago I used Rackspace for their "Rackspace Cloud" Services. The services were affordable and worked for the most part, however, the value started going down thanks to price increases and other nonsense. Further, they had odd service issues, and customer service was NOT as great as they claimed. I moved on.
I honestly didn't even realize that they still existed as a company until this article was mentioned.
Decades ago I used Rackspace for their "Rackspace Cloud" Services. The services were affordable and worked for the most part, however, the value started going down thanks to price increases and other nonsense. Further, they had odd service issues, and customer service was NOT as great as they claimed. I moved on.
I honestly didn't even realize that they still existed as a company until this article was mentioned.
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Interesting.
I've been working in IT for about 15 years now; email administration is certainly a challenging role (one I enjoy), but no one wants to pay anyone to do it anymore.
Or, if you do it, you are covering thousands of users or more, which can be a bit unnerving; especially when a major issues arises, and people expect that you'll 'click a few buttons and have it fixed in no time', when you don't have the staffing to handle that many support requests.
I truly feel that the shift to 'zero-trust' architectures has moved way passed the hardware/software level and hit humans (how they operate) really hard. I also feel it's the primary reason I'm out of work - too many consolidations to cloud & AI, and the overall lack of trust of IT staff.
I've been working in IT for about 15 years now; email administration is certainly a challenging role (one I enjoy), but no one wants to pay anyone to do it anymore.
Or, if you do it, you are covering thousands of users or more, which can be a bit unnerving; especially when a major issues arises, and people expect that you'll 'click a few buttons and have it fixed in no time', when you don't have the staffing to handle that many support requests.
I truly feel that the shift to 'zero-trust' architectures has moved way passed the hardware/software level and hit humans (how they operate) really hard. I also feel it's the primary reason I'm out of work - too many consolidations to cloud & AI, and the overall lack of trust of IT staff.
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So email is something you can't take control back. My whole reason to move to Rackspace when they ran the Exchange service. Was because you had no control over OTHER mail servers. Yes you could run your own no problem. But once you start getting blacklisted for not being large enough by zealot Admins who run other mail services and get blackholed. You have zero fighting chance of actually running business. You're basically buying into the guy who has more muscle over the other guy trying to block them for whatever reason.
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Exactly that. Apollo bought Rackspace in 2016, using massive leveraged debt that the company has been paying impossible interest on ever since, all the while cutting jobs and cutting corners on service. After the IPO to make them public in 2020 Apollo remained as a large investor. There's not much left to bleed out now.
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I mean, that response sounds like it was just an autoreply from a bot. Not even an "AI" one.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
Sure, easy. Except when your ISP won't even setup reverse DNS as an add-on for a business plan that already costs 2.5x what a faster non-business plan costs.
I self-hosted email for years. I gave up because it just wasn't worth the headache and extra $150 per month for slower internet.
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I still do it (on AWS, no less, with postfix+dovecot, for about $100-ish a year) but I've got the advantage at this point of an IP address with ~12 years of positive sender reputation. It is rather a chicken-and-egg problem to start from scratch these days.
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Why in the world would I want to deal with all that headache? I'm not an IT expert nor want to be. I'd rather pay an expert service who knows what they're doing.
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and in further [imagined] conversation with "company spokesperson" ...If you cannot afford our new pricing schedule, we suggest (request/direct) you shop for server hosting at another company...'
The harsh reality of buying services from companies that, well, just need more money.
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I'm a 4-decades-in-IT guy and have looked into this option - and quickly noped out.
Waaay too much hassle, complexity and stress for something I can buy OTS for a few dollars a month.
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I switched to Proton for Business several years ago and have never looked back.
Secure and zero complaints. And, it's outside of the Graying-Orange Baboon's reach.
Secure and zero complaints. And, it's outside of the Graying-Orange Baboon's reach.
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Dude's in Europe. In the US, none of what he describes is even near possible without a huge dollar spend or luck.
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ubercurmudgeon
Ars Tribunus Militum
Remember when Martin Shkreli massively hiked the price of an old piece of technology (a drug) and everyone rightly condemned him for it? Way back in the halcyon age known as 2015, in the before times. He was busted, for other crimes not pure avarice, but it was thought such an aberation of obscene greed had been nipped in the bud. Turns out that was an experiment, setting an upper limit for rapaciousness, and the same tactic has since been rolled out to less and less locked-in groups of users, and older and older (or simpler and simpler) technologies.
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It's a pain to switch, but you can get much cheaper email many other places and still host your website at rackspace if that's what you like.
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Went public in 2020, and only increasing prices 5-6 years later (albeit by an absurd percentage)?
The resellers should consider themselves lucky.
The resellers should consider themselves lucky.
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You don't need the reverse DNS to match your hostname, it just needs to eventually become consistent.
I have a dynamic IP that rarely changes. I point my A and MX record at that IP. Doing a reverse on the IP turns up an #-#-#-#.res.spectrum.com name. Looking up that name returns the same IP as my A record. So everything is good.
I've been running email from home since the late '90s. There weren't any good paid options available at the time, and my ISP's email service was shit. Now I've got too much momentum.
I do have to relay my outbound email through my ISP's mail servers though. Since I'm a dynamic IP, I'm viewed (rightfully) as a botnet spammer. 99.9999% of email coming from a dynamic IP is botnet spam.
I believe in the original distributed model of the internet, and will walk the walk. I think about managing the email service like once a year.
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Way overkill man. I run my own on a consumer grade cable modem, with a dynamic IP. The IP rarely changes, and I have a script that updates the A and MX record when the ethernet interface comes up.
Email was designed back when networks were unreliable, and even major links might be dial up connections. It's got a great store-and-forward protocol. Your local email server accepts the email from your client, and tries to send it to destination. If it can't, it'll store and retry later. If I can't get my personal email for a few hours when my ISP is offline, that's ok, because I can't use the internet either. It's fairly rare.
[Edit to add] In fact, my spam strategy relies on the store-and-forward to weed out bots. I use postgrey. Anytime I get a new IP, From, and To, they get a temporary error. Botnets give up and don't retry. Real email servers retry after a few minutes, and then postfix accepts the email.
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It's a bold move for a company that might still be lingering in REJECT lists. There are less expensive full-service companies without the dark history.
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I upvoted you b/c I believe in 'rolling your own' but b/c I offer hosting to my clients that is infeasible for me. But if all I had to worry about was my 4 personal domains I'd definitely do that.
The key to staying in contact is setting up DMARC and SPF records so you can keep getting through to the highly-spammed addresses.
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Do you not have a phone with mobile internet access? I know I do, and it's pretty crucial during the not-infrequent Xfinity outages we get.
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So was Rockspace not planning to deliver reliable service without the price increase?
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I do, but internet outages are rare, and I use a lot of data when working from home. It's usually worth waiting a bit to see how long it's going to be. Most of the infrastructure is buried here. We had 3 short (I didn't notice, but my kid did), and 1 long (~4 hour) outage recently. I can't tell you the previous outage. Most "outages" are my cable modem needing a reboot, not a real outage.
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That's quite a trip from the past... these guys are still around? At $WORK we used to have a few actual servers sitting on their racks, back when renting a physical server in someone's data center was the normal thing to do. We saved quite a lot of money on the monthly bill when the "cloud" became a thing and we moved to similarly sized VPSs at a major provider.
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I guess I should be happy then that my price is increasing only 100%. We have servers on the old legacy platform. To migrate it will be a huge headache since Rackspace does not offer automatic migration. This is the email I got. I'm not even sure what the pricing on their new platform is and how does it compare (it would have been nice if they quoted me that). Just out of the blue, no prior notification. Now I have to piss customers who did not budget this for the new year by increasing our prices for the services using these cloud servers.
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<snerk> and <snort> at "just run your own".
I ran my own from 1995 to around 2015. Various systems, mostly a nice one called Communigate Pro, on OS varying from Solaris to Linux. For 2 people's personal email and some small business stuff. Finally threw in the towel.
You couldn't pay me to go back to that! (in fact, if I did it for my own email, it would indeed be nobody paying me) Not even on some cloud instance.
Still have my own domains, but the only thing I set is MX records (and whatever other annoying TXT records Exchange Online demands).
I'm in the process of moving off it, finally sick and tired of MS constant price hikes and unwanted features shoved in (AI), but even so, no way I'm not going to find some cheap-enough local hoster.
I ran my own from 1995 to around 2015. Various systems, mostly a nice one called Communigate Pro, on OS varying from Solaris to Linux. For 2 people's personal email and some small business stuff. Finally threw in the towel.
You couldn't pay me to go back to that! (in fact, if I did it for my own email, it would indeed be nobody paying me) Not even on some cloud instance.
Still have my own domains, but the only thing I set is MX records (and whatever other annoying TXT records Exchange Online demands).
I'm in the process of moving off it, finally sick and tired of MS constant price hikes and unwanted features shoved in (AI), but even so, no way I'm not going to find some cheap-enough local hoster.
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Not flexing here - I've been doing it for a little over 10 years (bare metal, Linode, etc.) except I actually had to cycle IPs in a few domains. Would I ever recommend that the average hobby sysadmin or coder do it?
Fuck no.
Large mail providers are hostile to smaller operations and you have to get EVERYTHING perfect (including now DNSSEC and MTA-STS/DANE) to get respect. And then you deal with the usual garbage like Barracuda to keep yourself whitelisted.
I do consider it a good cause, but we can't lie about how much of a hassle it is.
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Fastmail charges $5/month for 60GB. Or an the Family plan $11/month for 6 accounts with 360 GB (total) storage.
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