A fun story! Packet support contacted me one day last fall to ask about my business. I said I had none, I used Packet years before then for personal projects and only for a few days. Then they asked what my plans were for the 13 VMs I had running. I knew of no such VMs.<p>I guess my account got pwned.<p>They asked how I'd pay for these - $900 worth I think - since I didn't have a valid card in their system (the previous one expired since I last used Packet). I told them to stop the VMs and allow me to reset my credentials. I also asked them to investigate their logs and geolocate all the users that logged into my account. I was also curious they actually let someone log into the account from a new IP (without notifying me) and also allowed them to run instances without a valid card.<p>They blocked my account, which also blocked this support thread. So I started a new thread from an alternative e-mail address to resolve the issues.<p>I never heard from them again.
Likely bad news and writing on the wall for the open-but-competitive culture at Packet. Equinix has been historically turning every single acquisition into a closed-off enterprise-only product/service, especially in the IXP space.
Packet’s offering are so good and so much above competition that it’s not even funny.<p>I mean, why almost no one else is offering BGP ECMP, byoip, anycast routing, a sane setup system among others. It boggles my mind.<p>It’s a hard sell going back to geoip and shitty layer2 switching that you get everywhere else after using their services.
Packet's blog post: <a href="https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/" rel="nofollow">https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/</a><p>This is probably a good play for Equinix as it provides a lower barrier to entry to a segment of the market that they typically haven't engaged (Packet being largely profitable probably helps).<p>In addition, I believe Packet already had presence in a number of Equinix datacenters so "landlord buys tenant" comes to mind...
I was hoping for Packet to be the next big bare metal provider so this is kinda sad at first glance. I’ve heard great things about them but haven’t used them; I was considering them for a side project of spinning up my own k8s cluster just because.<p>GCP and AWS probably fit the needs of most established businesses. I know quite a few startups that use bare metals though since they cost a lot less. Plus, you have complete visibility and control over your entire stack.<p>I hope others spring up to address the market of users needing extremely highly customized systems at the lowest costs.
I wonder what the purchase price was. According to TechCrunch, Packet was valued at $100M and had raised $36M.
<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-metal-cloud-provider-packet/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-...</a>
<i>"When the transaction closes later this quarter, Packet will continue operating as before: same team, same platform, same vision. Our commitment to our customers ..."</i> -- The question is <i>how long</i> before Equinix decides to change the <i>status quo</i>.<p>I'm seeing it as yet another (after recent news on Visa's Plaid acquisition) blow to diversification and competition in the cloud and technology ecosystems. Generally, industry consolidation is IMO a scary thing ...
This is sad news. I used Packet for a benchmarking project (<a href="https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks</a>) and was super impressed by the ease of use. Put EC2 absolutely to shame (and was much cheaper than EC2’s bare metal offering).
I'm not sure that very many people understood what sort of spot pricing Packet had. I have rented <i>so many</i> hours of EPYC server time for $.25/hr in SJC1. Or a 96 core ARM machine for $.30/hr in Amsterdam.<p>I had good luck with them and they were always responsive in their Slack. I was sad to see the news, anyway.
So Equinx is stepping into Cloud Hosting?<p>What makes Packet any difference to, Linode, DO, Upcloud, Vultr, Hivelocity, and many others? Where the first few are bringing Bare Metal to its offering along with Database aaS.
When IBM bought SoftLayer, it destroyed the value proposition of SoftLayer, and we had to move.<p>Looks like we'll be shopping for a new provider, again.
Running Bullshit.js over the press release...<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/hNvmjvV.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/hNvmjvV.png</a>