Amazon Rival Rackspace Evokes Dot-Com Era Deal: Real M&A

Rackspace Hosting Inc. is tempting buyers that covet a foothold in the cloud to tackle the largest U.S. Internet takeover since the dot-com bubble.

Rackspace has more than tripled since its 2008 initial public offering as it evolved into Amazon.com Inc.’s biggest competitor in cloud computing, which allows businesses to save money on data centers by storing information on remote servers and accessing it via the Web. While the $6.1 billion company has a higher valuation relative to earnings than almost two-thirds of Internet software and e-commerce firms, it’s less than half as expensive as Amazon, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.