I expect they're worried about being replaced by AI themselves. Cost cutting here is probably pre-emptive.

You can build pretty decent sites with $20 Claude Pro, no WordPress or other knowledge required.

I uploaded a photo of my wife and told it to make something that would showcase all the cool new features.

NB2 generated a photo of my wife using the editor to make a picture.

Touche, sir.

I'm gonna need a bigger garage!

Yes, but the people and hardware are dying of old age. And both the people who use it and maintain it.

COBOL was old when I helped a few clients troubleshoot/move away in the 2000's. The folks committed to using it in 2026 are one metaphorical asteroid away from extinction. Hopefully someone in leadership sees and can influence that.

Probably the best answer. You're right that it really depends.

My desktop? 10-15 seconds.

A Dell R-series server without boot memory test? Probably 1-2 minutes for iDRAC's hardware profiler to finish.

Some lightweight Debian VM I just spooled up for a project? I think the Grub menu timeout takes longer than the boot process.

Based on previous experiments it'll try blackmailing you for more content.

But, you're dead. It has to try and bring you back long enough to get the content to serve its purpose. ...and that's how we get the zombie apocalypse.

Please. We'll take alternative marketplaces any day.

If we're getting politically harangued no matter what we do then it's time to open up the market. Why protect a country's copyright that won't reciprocate?

I've worked for a competitor to RackSpace for ~30 years. They're not trying to compete with Google. RackSpace has always sold itself as a premium product, especially on the support side:

Their servers have always been more expensive
Their colo has always been more expensive
Their VPS has always been more expensive

Since starting they've sold themselves on crazy good support and uptime. They don't have the market share/automation of Google or the bulk goals of a dollar hosting provider. Ideally when you call RackSpace you're getting a live person, and the service uptime is 100%.

The short notice sucks because of their customer service expectations. But pricing is right in line with premium price for premium product. A similar two-facility setup for email redundancy with 24/7 live support would reasonably be $10/mo.

We have direct peerings for services like voice, and IX'es for the big data providers. But at that scale I think it'd flatten at least one of our gateway providers, even with wire-speed ACLs and big routing hardware.

I'd be very curious what Microsoft did.

This might help the next generation of users, but Broadcom blowing up the VMware SME market with huge license fees has already done its damage.

Proxmox is free, uses KVM under the hood, and easily installed on commodity hardware. Gonna be hard winning back market share from that.

Come-on, we already know they'll just raise prices another 10% to address this. It's just another straight-to-consumer tax under the auspices or taming corporations.

Yeah, our public time server gets absolutely hammered when Amazon users en masse decide to use it.

You'd think for such a large company they'd be hosting common infrastructure (like mirrors) for the betterment of the internet. That little thing they're making *billions* from.

We try so hard to America that our lawyers are graduating from the Costco school of not reading so good.

Brought to you by Carl's jr.

I think that's very provider/hardware dependent. We get compliments all the time about call latency and quality, but we're also the ISP in many cases and have direct peerings with a number of local telcos. Media takes a short path, and ideally is IP based all the way to the endpoint.

And just because traffic isn't VoIP doesn't mean it isn't switched. PRI/T1 operates on a timer, as did a bunch of older cell networks.

As with all things, ymmv. I do appreciate some of the "old days" hardware though, the reason that ancient Nortel is still running a rural network is because it has survivability measured in Nokia 3310's.

They do. Poles are hopefully a little too scary for them, but people cutting into any kind of conduit for copper scrap is fairly common.

We've had it happen in buildings & multi-complexes, and just last month a major backhaul to northern Alberta was cut that serviced several providers.

Both times the thieves made off with nothing because it was fibre. But the damage is a costly pain in the ass.