In 2012, we started off as a software company developing SaaS server management products for cloud servers. As our customers' businesses grew, they needed more than software.

Many of our software customers needed expert sysadmins who could identify and solve any infrastructure problem they had at any time of day. These customers wanted to hire us to take responsibility for their cloud infrastructure, but until EarlyDog we only offered software.

We’d been thinking about EarlyDog for a long time. Our very first ServerPilot customer had been waiting patiently for years for us to begin offering fully managed custom infrastructure. In the meantime, they’d been using Rackspace and becoming less and less happy with the support they were getting as Rackspace changed.

I’d long been a fan of Rackspace and used to recommend them frequently. My first experience with Rackspace was in 2003 when they came to the rescue of a software company I worked for. One of our servers had been compromised through a vulnerability in Plesk. Rackspace rebuilt the server for us and restored all sites and data.

We knew we wanted to launch EarlyDog. We had a growing software business and a growing team of amazing engineers. The issue was timing. We’d tempered our ambitions for the first years until Allison was able to take over from me as CEO, allowing me to focus on the technical direction of the company. Once that happened in 2020, we set out building EarlyDog and launched in early 2021.

With the launch of EarlyDog, Rackspace is no longer the best solution for startups and SMBs who need experts to manage their cloud infrastructure.

For any Rackers reading this, please know we respect what you’ve created. My opinions of where Rackspace as a business has gone in recent years have nothing to do with the many great people who work there.