mosso

Last week, Rackspace announced the acquisition of two companies - VPS provider Slicehost and cloud storage service Jungle Disk. While both acquisitions are indicative of Rackspace's new cloud hosting strategy, Jungle Disk is an interesting case, being a cloud storage/backup service originally based on Amazon S3. JungleDisk uses Amazon's global cloud service to allow the sharing of an unlimited amount of information through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup. The pricing model is also innovative -- users pay only for the amount of data they store, per gigabyte, without additional setup and support fees.

Will existing and upcoming cloud computing platforms spell trouble for traditional hosting providers? This is an important question, given the massive amount of new developments in that area. But it is really a matter of valid concern?