RackSpace Hosting Inc. had some news today, but not the big news investors had hoped for.

The company, which provides managed cloud computing services to corporations, disappointed investors by issuing an outlook for slower growth for the rest of the year. Its shares, which had fallen 2.3 percent in trading today, fell about 1.8 percent in after-hours trading.

The San Antonio, TX-based company reported a second-quarter profit of 28 cents a share, or 38 cents before certain costs such as stock compensation. That beat analysts’ expectations of 21 cents a share. Sales rose 7 percent, to $524 million. Shifts in currency rates and the first-quarter sale of its Jungle Disk file hosting business hurt growth.

But the company declined to address the big question for investors: a possible buyout. The Wall Street Journal reported Aug. 4 that the company was nearing a sale to an unnamed private equity firm for up to $4 billion, a billion dollars more than it was valued before the news broke. Chief Executive Taylor Rhodes (pictured above) had only one thing to say about the potential deal: “We can’t comment on speculation or rumors.”

A subsequent Reuters story said Apollo Global Management LLC could bid $3.5 billion, or $27 a share. On Aug. 5, the company’s shares rose 10 percent, to $29.27, and they’re almost 50 percent higher than three months ago. Wells Fargo and Oppenheimer both said the business could support a $32-a-share buyout — still far below their 2013 high of nearly $80.

If the deal happens, it would end a long period of uncertainty since 2014, when Rackspace said it was looking at acquisition deals but couldn’t get the price it wanted. At the time, it said it would proceed with a new managed cloud strategy, avoiding more direct competition with rival cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform by offering more support. Last year, the company forged deals with Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to make it easier for companies to move computing workloads to those companies’ clouds.

The strategy to focus on higher-margin services generally has appeared to pay off to some extent. Last year, the company reported a 14 percent rise in profit, to $122.4 million, on a 12 percent increase in revenues, to $2 billion. However, cloud computing itself, AWS in particular, is growing much faster, and indeed Rackspace’s revenue growth rate has since declined.

“We made strong progress on our key financial metrics,” Chief Executive Officer Taylor Rhodes said on the earnings conference call. “We also expanded leadership of the managed cloud market,” particularly thanks to its AWS managed cloud service. He said the company plans to launch a “bold marketing campaign” this fall for its managed cloud service.

Rhodes said the company has signed 277 customers of its AWS service since it launched nine months ago. Half of those are new customers to Rackspace, he added, and more than 60 percent of those customers are choosing the higher AWS service level, called Aviator.

Clouding the picture, however, the company also issued an outlook that indicates continued slower growth of about 5 percent to 6 percent for the third quarter and 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent for the year.

Cloud computing has seen a flurry of deals recently, especially as leaders such as AWS and Azure have cemented their leadership. In July, Oracle Corp. said it would buy NetSuite Inc. for $9.3 billion. And in June, Microsoft announced a blockbuster deal to buy LinkedIn Corp. for $26.2 billion. Not least, Dell’s $67 billion deal to buy EMC Corp. is imminent.

Rackspace may be considering a deal to go private because of its business model transition or because it’s facing limits on how much it can expand in a world increasingly dominated by AWS. “Rackspace may be bumping up against the limit of what an open-source cloud solution can handle,” said Peter Burris, SiliconANGLE Media’s chief research officer.

Rackspace helped found the OpenStack project with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to create an open standard for public and private cloud technologies. The organization will hold a conference Tuesday and Wednesday in Mountain View, sponsored by Mirantis Inc. SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE video unit will be interviewing executives at the conference. (Disclosure: TheCUBE is the paid media partner for OpenStack Days. Sponsors and interviewees have no editorial oversight of videos or stories on the show.)

Photo from Rackspace