Rackspace Customers Grapple With 'Devastating' Email Hosting Price Hike (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0180616104
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/19/1955239/rackspace-customers-grapple-with-devastating-email-hosting-price-hike
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/rackspace-raises-email-hosting-prices-by-as-much-as-706-percent/
> In recent weeks, Rackspace [1]updated its email hosting pricing . Its standard plan is now $10 per mailbox per month. Businesses can also pay for the Rackspace Email Plus add-on for an extra $2/mailbox/month (for "file storage, mobile sync, Office-compatible apps, and messaging"), and the Archiving add-on for an extra $6/mailbox/month (for unlimited storage).
>
> As recently as November 2025, Rackspace charged $3/mailbox/month for its Standard plan, and an extra $1/mailbox/month for the Email Plus add-on, and an additional $3/mailbox/month for the Archival add-on, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Rackspace's reseller partners have been especially vocal about the impacts of the new pricing.
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> In a blog post on Thursday, web hosting service provider and Rackspace reseller Laughing Squid said Rackspace is "increasing our email pricing by an astronomical 706 percent, with only a month-and-a half's notice." Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale told Ars Technica that he received the "devastating" news via email on Wednesday. The last time Rackspace increased Laughing Squid's email prices was by 55 percent in 2019, he said.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/rackspace-raises-email-hosting-prices-by-as-much-as-706-percent/
Reseller? (Score:1)
Just setup your own email service. Personally I see this as their failure not rackspaces.
Re: Reseller? (Score:2)
To be fair they're running a wordpress hosting company it's not like they're strangers to tech things unless they're reselling the wordpress hosting as well. I would fully agree with you if this was their end users though who probably aren't up to running their own service.
Re: (Score:3)
> To be fair they're running a wordpress hosting company it's not like they're strangers to tech things unless they're reselling the wordpress hosting as well. I would fully agree with you if this was their end users though who probably aren't up to running their own service.
To be more fair, they're running Wordpress hosting. It's not only possible, but extremely likely they have zero attachment to the tech world. I've worked with some Wordpress admins through work that couldn't log into a shell to save their lives, let alone think about installing something as complex as a mail host.
Re: Reseller? (Score:2)
Perhaps I've overestimated the knowledge required of a Wordpress admin then. My apologies.
Re:If $10 monthly is a sum that... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's $10 per mailbox , where the old price was $3/mo per mailbox. Any organization with more than fifty employees and hosting their email on Rackspace is going to notice the cost being more than three times what it was before. That's $1800 becoming $6k for the year.
Re: (Score:3)
50 employees cost at least $2,500,000 a year where I live. I can totally see how an extra $4000 (0.16%) is devastating! At least they have a solid excuse to lay off 10% of their workers now.
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, its sooooo awesome to show off your success by overpaying .... what sort of deranged logic is that?
Crazy (Score:2)
I think I pay 10/mo for a small server. On it I run email and web.
Re: (Score:2)
> I think I pay 10/mo for a small server. On it I run email and web.
That's the way to do it, at least until IPv6 with static IP's becomes standard. I do the same thing you do. I have a personal server and a small business server. I pay about $13/month for each. They only have 100Mb connections, but that is adequate for my needs.
They got bained (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in 2016 they got bought out by private equity and saddled with a shitload of debt paid out to the people who bought them.
It's a miracle they have survived this long. These price hikes are a hail Mary trying to soak as much money out of people locked into them as they can before they collapse under the weight of the debt.
Remember that every time private equity devours one of these companies it results in Mass layoffs. Even if you survive those layoffs there are now fewer jobs and more people loo
Re: (Score:3)
And here I thought a web hosting company getting bought out by EIG was bad enough. Turns out private equity can be even worse.
People used Rackspace? (Score:4, Informative)
When I started at a new job 15 years ago they were on rackspace...and it sucked. Spam/phishing detection was horrible, I'd spend 30 minutes every day just sifting through crap, and that was on a new email address. Boss had a 10yr old email address, that was way worse.
Couldn't get us off of it fast enough. Even gmail is better. I can't imagine how any business functions with them.
Ah, yes. (Score:1)
"The first fix is free." Now that you're hooked, bend it.
Find another provider (Score:2)
Is there a reason why you can't find another provider? Maybe there isn't one you can switch to in a month and a half, but big bang price increases with little notice doesn't bode well for your future with Rackspace.
Best,
Re:Find another provider (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the silly thing. They were the other provider. If they can't even compete with Microsoft or Google mailbox sizes at $10/mo how bad are they at this?
Rackspace: 25GB at $10
Microsoft: 50GB at $4
Google: 30GB at $6
Re: (Score:2)
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 Rac
Re: (Score:2)
> Is there a reason why you can't find another provider? Maybe there isn't one you can switch to in a month and a half, but big bang price increases with little notice doesn't bode well for your future with Rackspace.
> Best,
Unfortunately, fewer and fewer hosting companies provide their own email services; over the past years most of them have migrated to 3rd party services like Microsoft's Exchange Online or Google's business email, both of which charge significantly more per mailbox.
When Godaddy did that a few years ago I looked at a lot of places, and the best option I came across was OpenSRS/Tucows, who has been around since 1999. they still only charged $0.50/month per mailbox or so. Only caveat is that they don't sell