Rackspace Hosting today announced it has acquired privately owned VPS provider Slicehost, and storage provider Jungle Disk. (hat tip to TechCrunch)
The purchase price of the combined acquisitions is approximately $11.5 million payable in cash and stock, with the potential for up to $16.5 million in additional payouts of cash and stock based on certain performance criteria.
Rackspace is one of the largest providers of dedicated servers. Recently it has also moved into the virtualization world through partnerships with VMware and its own “cloud” division Mosso. Today’s announcement further shows that traditional hosting companies anticipate a growing importance of virtualization-based solutions.
Slicehost is one of the leading providers of Xen-based virtual servers. They cater mostly to developer crowds. In two years they have managed to build a customer base that runs more than 15.000 virtual servers.
Jungle Disk is a provider of storage software that works in conjunction with Amazon’s S3 storage platform. Rackspace announced that it will gradually move over new customers to its own storage systems, but will continue to support Amazon S3 as well.
Rackspace owns 8 datacenters in the United States, Hong Kong and the UK, and further has sales offices througout Europe and South Africa.