Rackspace Vice President of Product, Mark Interrante, announced by e-mail today that Slicehost will be shut down within the next year and migrate its customers to Rackspace Cloud. “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,” Interrante writes. The migration to IPv6 and OpenStack are cited as more specific reasons for the move.
Rackspace acquired Slicehost in 2008 and has been maintaining it as a mostly separate entity ever since.
“Converting from Slicehost accounts to Rackspace Cloud Servers accounts will enable you to prepare for IPv6, and give you access to Cloud Files, the Cloud Files CDN Powered by Akamai, and Cloud Load Balancers,” Interrante writes.
The e-mail does not include any information on if and how pricing will change. Based on current Rackspace Cloud pricing, costs will be higher for Slicehost customers with high traffic requirements, but lower for customers with low bandwidth requirements. Rackspace did not discuss details about migrating customers.
Initial response from customers is negative. The top rated comment right now on the Hacker News thread about the announcement reads:
I have a ton of apps running on my old slices. A client pays monthly for the one slice and it really doesn’t look like it will cover costs with the shift to their ‘cloud’ servers. I really don’t want to have to go and reconfigure several versions of python and django and several apps. I don’t want to migrate databases. I don’t want to move various processes that have been running without being touched for 3-5 years.
The email doesn’t give us any indication of the migration path. I don’t care about your IPv6 problems or your OpenStack announcements.
Even something like domains hasn’t been addressed. I use the slicehost interface to manage a dozen or so domains and their subdomains. Am I going to have to shift nameservers and reconfigure these domains?
Another commenter points to a tool for easily migrating DNS to Linode, a long time competitor of Slicehost. A few other migration tools were mentioned as well.
