Since 1998, Rackspace has been a provider of infrastructural cloud computing support, as well as managed hosting products for enterprise-level organizations of all sizes and types all over the world. This includes everything from cloud-based storage to virtual server space to actual web hosting for large companies. To meet this need, they currently manage eight different datacenter locations: three in Texas, two in Virginia, one in Illinois, two in the UK and a single datacenter in China.
Rackspace & Customer Service
In addition to their wide range of cloud hosting services, Rackspace is often known for providing fanatical customer service. This translates to an intimate relationship with their customers. They’ve been known to help clients reduce stress by having food delivered during long hours at the office. In recent years, this dedication to service has made Rackspace a leader in the managed hosting industry.
Rackspace and the Magic Quadrant
Rackspace was even featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report under the Managed Hosting category. For the uninitiated, the Magic Quadrant is a prestigious report that comes out annually, informing consumers of some of the leading tech products and services currently available.
Three Examples of Rackspace in Action
· SkinnyCorp, Inc – SkinnyCorp is a Chicago-based consulting firm specializing in client-based web development. As a side project, members of the firm decided to start a company called Threadless. The site provides a platform for clothing designers and artists to showcase their work and sell it at an affordable rate. This little side project rapidly exploded to be one of the most popular sites of its kind on the web.
Their problem, although a good one to have, made their “side project” more complicated. With the massive amount of inbound users, their current infrastructure was unable to manage all the incoming and outgoing transactions. They were experiencing regular downtime, and needed to find a practical hosting solution. They were at the point where they could either hire a massive staff of system administrators, or look for a large-scale managed hosting provider. Fortunately, they found just that in Rackspace, and haven’t experienced any downtime since moving their hosting to Rackspace.
· Advanced Data Exchange – ADX offers a critical service that allows vending providers – particularly in the manufacturing industry – to send and receive vending data on a large scale. Essentially, they improve the quality of information shared between trading partners through the use of EDI technology. But the company itself needed a way to better manage this data in the cloud, so they started developing new system infrastructural architecture.
As ADX began developing their new infrastructure, they turned to Rackspace for hosting support. Rackspace built three different environments that allowed for seamless hosting of ADX’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data management platform.
· Bluetooth Sig – With nearly 4000 companies building products for Bluetooth devices, Bluetooth Sig saw a natural need to provide support for these rapidly growing businesses. Bluetooth Sig, a Denmark-based Bluetooth special interest group, boasts upwards of 30,000 users. This caused regular outages, which incidentally affected their business. They knew they needed a better solution to keep their system up and running. Because of the high availability and up-time cloud hosting is able to provide, the Bluetooth advocacy group turned to Rackspace for assistance.
While these three certainly have impressive use cases, they definitely aren’t the only innovative companies that have chosen Rackspace for their cloud hosting needs. As a hosting company that’s been around for more than a decade, Rackspace has racked up quite a few interesting clients.
