November 21, 2008

Rackspace Web Hosting

Rackspace is a provider focusing almost entirely on the market for 100% uptime for web hosting. If their hosted services go down for network of hardware reasons, they will refund a percentage of the monthly costs to the customer on a ‘per minute of downtime' basis, capped at 100% of the monthly fee. This is certainly putting their money where their mouth is, and it generates a great deal of confidence in their service offering.

Rackspace hosts only the servers and server space--with some software supplied to allow for the server hardware and operating system management. Their prices are quite a bit more than the prices offered for shared web hosting, which is expected, as the customer with Rackspace is assured that their server is hosting only them. The Rackspace customer is further supplied with a dedicated team--not just a single account executive. They also pride themselves on being able to present a live person for support contact 24 by 7 by 365. This is of such a concern that the operational Rackspace employee complement is only 20% sales but a whopping 80% support staff. EarthLink is winning awards in the lightweight web presence mass market, while Rackspace is aimed only at the medium to large enterprise with serious, dedicated requirements for web hosting. EarthLink also hosts the big guys, and their live 24 by 7 support is compelling, while the Rackspace dedicated team service offering also makes them worthy players in this space. EarthLink may offer more features and different pricing, but Rackspace stakes its reputation on reliability.

In order to maximize their uptime claims Rackspace has also purchased 60% excess bandwidth. At present, only 40% of their bandwidth is being utilized day to day, with new bandwidth being purchased all the time – excellent peace of mind.

Rackspace will build a server suited to each customer and host just that server for the customer. The servers on offer range from a single CPU entry-level box right the way through to enterprise-grade clusters for load balancing and fault tolerance. Their bandwidth costs are also tailored to each customer for their needs.

If a guaranteed uptime and dedicated support team is what your web presence cannot do without – you're selling most of your products online, your customers use your website at all hours or your reputation depends on uptime - then Rackspace is your service provider. The premium you pay for dedicated web hosting is well worth it as an insurance against any damage to be done from downtime.

Latest Rackspace News

Rackspace Cloud Gains General Manager
San Antonio, Texas - (The Hosting News) - November 18, 2008 - Rackspace Hosting’s cloud division, Mosso, has expanded its leadership team, naming previous vice president of the product group, Emil Sayegh as its new general manager. Mr. Sayegh’s responsibilities at Rackspace included the development, marketing and management of [...]

Latest Rackspace Blog Post

Truck Driver Crashes into Rackspace Datacenter
Could this be a new hacker tool? Do you remember the power mishap in July that brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter? A similar incident took place at Rackspace, a Dallas, Texas Web host which serves several local companies. I doubt that I will ever get around to building my own datacenter, but if [...]

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