Farewell To An IP

Slicehost, the company, stopped existing a while ago after they were acquired by Rackspace. So, the title is a bit inaccurate that way, but having kept the same VPS with them since 2008 (04/04/2008, to be precise), I still consider the server as a Slicehost box than a Rackspace one. It had gone through a couple of rebuilds in the years since 2008, but the IP remained the same (209.20.66.107), but it had not hosted anything worthwhile in a long time and I had kept it going since I was still using the DNS management, which remained as an item on the to-do list, that was dealt with in the past couple of days.
So much of the technology stack has changed in the past 4-5 years. There is now literally an ocean of high quality managed services are available now for so little that it is ushering in a world of a new generation of companies who do only integration and value addition by connecting the dots together. Once you dip your toes into those waters, either as a customer or as someone who builds the integrated solutions, the possibilities are endless. Those possibilities are also rapidly changing the world of enterprise, especially at the smaller end.
What used to cost thousands of dollars and at least a small team to build and maintain can now be put together and maintained using a fraction of the cost, if you know how to go about doing it. The playing field almost changes every 8-12 months with new technology and pricing becoming available in the market. This, though, may not always be a good thing as the choices can often be quite confusing and cost alone is not the only determining factor. Organizations that leverage these changes early and effectively will have a huge advantage over the ones that are slow.
And it should be a worrying fact that the cycle of hyper growth, to consistent growth, to plateauing growth, to declining growth is rapidly shrinking these days. Multi-billion dollar companies are created and disappear well within decade’s time, while it used to take close to that to get to hyper growth for companies at one point in time. The high end consulting and service companies won’t have it that easy either for a lot longer.