Rackspace management called Tumblr's David Karp yesterday and pleaded for mercy. The Web-hosting service even offered to cut bandwidth chargeds from $2 a gigabyte down to 40 cents. (Other Rackspace customers, take note.) Didn't work. Karp, who runs today's favorite blogging tool for emo hipsters, dropped the hammer anyway. In the end, he tells us, it wasn't even Rackspace's winter and fall full of fail that led him to quit the service.

Rackspace's promise of 100 percent uptime just doesn't mean that much anymore, Karp explained. He said after recent innovations, it has become far cheaper for startups to protect themselves from downtime by buying twice as many servers as they'll ever need rather than to go with managed hosting. If half of them suddenly fail, so what?

Some services and sites have known this for a while, but it's only now that Rackspace is reeling. Why? One disastrous side effect of the truck crash that caused Rackspace meltdown last fall, is that the downtime voided many clients' contracts. Under the terms of their agreements, they're now free to cancel service and go elsewhere.

(Photo by rp72)

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