Rackspace
Rackspace is a well known hosting company, providing hosting solutions to businesses around the globe. The company offers three basic hosting packages: managed hosting for dedicated servers, managed colocation in a do-it-yourself environment, and managed private cloud, which offers protections like Rackspace firewall.[1] Besides this they have packages for email hosting, cloud hosting and hybrid hosting.[2] Two levels of hosting support are provided, managed with limited support and intensive with additional consultation.[3]
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| Type: | Private |
| Industry: | Hosting |
| Founded: | 1998 |
| Founder(s): | Richard Yoo |
| Headquarters: | 5000 Walzem Road San Antonio, TX 78218 |
| Country: | USA |
| Businesses: | Jungle Disk, Slice Host, Webmail.us, Mosso Inc. |
| Employees: | More than 1500 |
| Revenue: | $224 million (2006) $628.99 million (2009) |
| Website: | Rackspace |
| Facebook: | Rackspace Managed Hosting |
| LinkedIn: | Rackspace Managed Hosting |
| Twitter: |  @Rackspace
|
| Key People | |
| Patrick Condon, Co-Founder Grahm Weston, Chairman | |
The company provides worldwide services with offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong.[4]
History
Richard Yoo, Dirk Elmendorf and Patrick Condon started Rackspace in 1998 after considering the needs of hosting solutions for users. The company received recognition in a very short time, and funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital in 2000.[5] Today, it has more than 70,000 customers in more than 40 countries.[6]
- In 2004 Rackspace Managed Hosting implemented Internap's Flow Control Platform in their servers for better control over bandwidth costs.[7]
- Rackspace partnershipped with Emic-an application clustering solutions provider for open source computing in June 2005.[8]
- Rackspace selected Ipswitch’s IMail™ Server Secure as the basis for expanding their managed email server in 2007.[9]
Performance
Rackspace is one of the largest and leading web host. It claims 100% uptime guarantee. With a few exceptions in June,[10] July,[11] November[12] and December[13] of 2009 Rackspace has managed to be provide excellent hosting with dedicated servers. On January 25, 12:30 am EST the Sapphire worm – also known as Slammer and SQLExp – infected more than 120,000 computers but Rackspace was successful in saving more than 7000 servers.[14]
The company is proud to have many high profiles and partnerships with them which include OnSpeed, Confused.com, The Army, Vue, Renault, online publication The Register, Huddle, Funny or Die, Metacafe, Suicide Girls,DriverGuide.com, and net connect.
Data Centres
Till 2008 Rackspace owned two offices in Uxbridge and Middlesex and rented four data centres in London. Rackspace Benelux in Amsterdam opened its offices in October 2007. It has won several high-profile customers such as LogicaCMG, Exact Software and CapGemini.
Rackspace Australia in Sydney opened its offices in March 2006.[15]
Certifications
Rackspace has following certifications:
- Microsoft Gold-Certified Hosting Partner.
- Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year — 2003, 2005, 2007.
- Strategic Dell Hosting Partner for Corporate Business Accounts (CBG).
- Red Hat Advanced Hosting Partner.
- MySQL Certified Hosting Partner.
Awards
Rackspace has received number of industry awards for its Fanatical Support. Some of them are:
- 2005 Stevie award winner.
- 2006 finalist for “Best Customer Service Organization”.[18]
- Rackspace UK has appeared in The Sunday Times best companies awards 2007,[19] and was in the top 50 UK workplaces as seen in the Financial Times.[20]
- The company was numbered 32 in top 100 companies in 2008, according to CNN Money.[21]