Video: WHIR TV features Emil Sayegh at HostingCon 2009

// August 27th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Announcements, Events

Emil Sayegh, our GM, participated in a Keynote at HostingCon 2009, “Shaping the Cloud Opportunity: Vision and Growth for the Future” along with other leaders in the Cloud space, Zane Adam of Microsoft, Stephen Cho of Google, and Daniel Burton of Salesforce.com. An interesting thread to the conversation was discussing the difference between Cloud Computing and Shared Hosting -  which everyone agreed was scalability. What really stirred the pot was when Emil quoted: “Shared hosting will become obsolete.” The WHIR listened in and wanted Emil to expand on his comments.  Here’s the video:

Cybernautic lands the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition Web Project

// August 26th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Community, Press Releases

By Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven

Chad Parker, President and CEO of Cybernautic, a web design firm out of Illinois, received this text message from a client just four short weeks ago:

“Drop what ur doing and get 2 our office immediately,”

Chad’s heart skipped a beat. Any web designer’s first thought would be:

“Oh no, they’re having a problem with their website!”

The client was Brady Homes, a local homebuilder. Chad rushed to Brady’s office, located in Bloomington, Illinois, to find the conference room filled with people, among them the executive and senior producers of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.  A family in Philo, Illinois had been chosen to have their home made over and Brady Homes was chosen as the builder – making Cybernautic head of the website project.

They were already discussing the details of the project, which would take place over the next three weeks. Everything about the project would be managed through the website: volunteer submission forms, donations and press releases. Cybernautic would be responsible for designing and running the website, administering the photography/videography for the entire project, from 8am to 8pm every day for the duration of the project, and managing the social media marketing, including the Extreme Makeover Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Following the meeting, the producers came up to Chad and said:

“Just make sure you have lots of beer and pizza handy for your web team 24/7, as they will need to be tied to their computers. We anticipate 14 million hits. And, by the way, we have never had a website not go down either during an Extreme Makeover project or within the 48 hours after the show’s initial air time. It’s inevitable that your website will go down.”

At the time, Cybernautic was testing the cloud computing offerings from The Rackspace Cloud and hadn’t migrated their websites over from ThePlanet yet.  They were happy with the results of his tests and decided that for the price, launching extremebradyhomes.com on Cloud Sites and Servers would be his best bet.

Within one week of the site launch,  they received over 5,000 online volunteer applications. Extreme Makeover released all the press releases through extremebradyhomes.com, a minimum of two per day, at 10am and 3pm, and this is where all reporters visited to obtain the news updates.  The Extreme Makeover site’s traffic statistics indicated over 68,000 unique viewers, going through about two dozen pages, and spending an average of five minutes on the website within the first five days.

Chad has dedicated a team of Cybernautic staff to the project. Originally given a deadline of two weeks, Cybernautic finished the website and Twitter/Facebook setup in less than one week.  With his team involved in the photography, videography, and social media marketing for this project, dealing with website instability was the last thing Chad wanted to worry about. And thanks to The Rackspace Cloud, it was.

“The speed has been so awesome. I am so amazed at the scalability – we haven’t had any performance issues, not even with all the traffic we were receiving. We are also impressed with a lot of the Cloud Sites features, especially the caching.”

Check out these Extreme Stats from the Extreme Makeover Project to date:

-         Over 68,000 unique visitors to the site in just 1 week!

-         Over 272,000 page views in just 1 week!

-         Almost 11,000 fans on Facebook! (10,732 right now)

-         Facebook fans in 21 countries and in 9 languages!

-         Website visitors from 51 countries in just 1 week

-         Average time spent on the website per visit: 3 minutes 58 seconds

-         Over 5,000 volunteer applications submitted online for roughly 2,500 positions

-         $18,000 worth of web, online marketing and management services by Cybernautic…donated

-         Being asked to play such a large and important role in such an incredible project…priceless

Cybernautic is donating this project, equal to about $18,000 in time and resources to ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to ensure the show receives all the coverage necessary to get volunteers involved and donations contributed so that Ty and his crew can give a beautiful new home to the Montgomery family. It’s an inspiring story and we are so proud to host this wonderful project on The Rackspace Cloud.

Stay tuned for the show to air in late October. Congratulations to Chad and his team at Cybernautic for this big win, and to the Montgomery Family!

The Rackspace Cloud Launches Cloud Tools, Ecosystem Portal

// August 25th, 2009 // Comments Off // Press Releases

Committed to development of an open cloud and to its strategic partners, Rackspace kicks off ecosystem with 25 participants and tools; more expected soon

SAN ANTONIO – August 25, 2009 – Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing, today announced the launch of Cloud Tools, an online service for sharing tools, applications and services built by the company’s strategic partners and independent developers for The Rackspace Cloud. This announcement further signals Rackspace’s continued commitment to an open cloud, and to supporting the cloud ecosystem. The new site aims to match customers with companies and independent developers building services on The Rackspace Cloud platform that expand the functionality and openness of cloud computing.

The Cloud Tools site catalogues tools and applications created on The Rackspace Cloud in four categories:  Monitoring & Reporting, Development Tools, System Management and Client Software. Visitors can browse the latest tools, search for features, rate the tools and post comments. For specific tools, users can view screenshots and user ratings, review user feedback and watch demo videos before being directed to the strategic partner’s website for download. Cloud Tools also highlights a “From the Community” section offering independent developers a way to publish their tools built using The Rackspace Cloud APIs and make them readily available to customers.

“The Rackspace Cloud is an excellent solution for scalable, on-demand computing, backed by Rackspace’s renowned customer service,” said Michael Crandell, RightScale CEO. “Rackspace’s commitment to helping drive success for their partners by leveraging their substantial customer base makes them a smart choice for cloud developers. We are thrilled to be a part of The Rackspace Cloud’s growing cloud ecosystem and to helping Rackspace customers reduce the complexity of cloud computing with the RightScale Cloud Management Platform.”

Cloud Tools, available today, features tools from such companies as RightScale, providing its Cloud Management Platform for enterprises, Mixpanel, a startup providing real-time user interaction analytics, Cyberduck, providing an open source file browser for Mac OS X that supports Rackspace Cloud Files, and tools from fifteen other partners and developers including: Beanstalk, Cloud Mobile, Cloudkick, Django Cumulus, Elastic Rack, enStratus, jclouds, Jungle Disk (a Rackspace subsidiary), LibCloud, Olark Live Website Chat, rPath, SOASTA, Sonian, Vanilla, Zeus, and several more projects from the community. Other companies and developers have indicated that they are planning to make their tools, applications and services available in the coming weeks. Some tools are free while others can be purchased for a fee established by the developer.

“At Rackspace, it is a real priority to constantly seek out new opportunities to connect our customers with quality services,” said Jim Curry, vice president of corporate development, Rackspace Hosting. “This tool-sharing service, along with our commitments to collaborate with the community to build an open cloud, lays the foundation for a large ecosystem. With the recent release of our APIs, we’ve seen an influx of interest in developing applications for our cloud computing offerings and we’re pleased to announce that such applications can be featured in our new Cloud Tools site.”

“As developers we are always looking for outstanding platforms to publish and promote the tools and applications we create and Cloud Tools is just that,” said Paul Querna, contributor, Libcloud project. “As a testament to its commitment to an open cloud, we look forward to further collaborating with The Rackspace Cloud and the rest of the developer community on tools introduced on the site.”
The Rackspace Cloud offers a suite of services, Cloud Servers™, Cloud Sites™ and Cloud Files™ designed to help companies minimize the hassles, high costs and complexities associated with scaling dedicated hardware.

For more information or to learn how your application can be featured on The Rackspace Cloud Tools please visit: tools.rackspace.com.

About The Rackspace Cloud
The Rackspace Cloud provides on-demand scalable website, application and storage hosting backed by Fanatical Support®.  Through its suite of cloud solutions, Cloud Sites™, Cloud Files™ and Cloud Servers™, The Rackspace Cloud enables astute developers and IT managers to minimize the hassles, upfront investments and high costs associated with dedicated hardware while offering the ability to easily scale hosting resources. For more information about The Rackspace Cloud, visit www.rackspacecloud.com or call 1-877-934-0409.

About Rackspace Hosting
As the leader and specialist in hosting services, Rackspace® Hosting is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, integrating the industry’s best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable. A trusted partner to companies of all sizes, Rackspace enables IT departments to be more effective. Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support®, furthering the company’s mission to be one of the world’s greatest service companies. Rackspace is recognized as one of FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best companies to work for in the US, ranking number 43 on the list.  Rackspace’s portfolio of hosted IT services includes Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Email and Apps. For more information on Rackspace Hosting please visit www.rackspace.com.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with our Cloud Hosting products or acceptance or use of our cloud hosting products and services; anticipated operational and financial benefits from our Cloud Hosting products and services or from further use and development of our cloud hosting products and services; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that benefits from our Cloud Hosting products and services may not materialize, due to a number of reasons including (i) a failure of the products to attain adequate reliability, quality or compatibility, (ii) changes in technology which adversely affect the benefit of the products, (iii) general economy or technology industry downturns, (iv) internal strategy decisions that negatively impact the progression or development of the products, and (v), and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2009, filed with the SEC on August 12, 2009. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

FreshBooks Chooses Hybrid Hosting From Rackspace

// August 25th, 2009 // Comments Off // Press Releases

SAN ANTONIO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting, today announced that FreshBooks, the leader in online invoicing and bookkeeping for professionals, is leveraging the company’s new hybrid model of both cloud and dedicated hosting to service their IT needs. A long time customer of Rackspace Managed Hosting and Rackspace Email & Apps, FreshBooks is now using The Rackspace Cloud™ to support the needs of its rapidly growing business.

With over 1,000,000 users and growing, FreshBooks offers fast and simple invoicing, expense and time tracking services, which help business professionals spend more time on their work, not their paperwork. A typical customer, FreshBooks claims, is able to get paid an average of 14 days faster using their service with sixty percent of FreshBooks users collecting more money through the service due to timelier billing and improved record keeping.

The Rackspace Cloud offers a suite of services, Cloud Servers™, Cloud Sites™ and Cloud Files™ designed to help companies like FreshBooks minimize the hassles, high costs, and complexities associated with scaling dedicated hardware. Through The Rackspace Cloud, FreshBooks now offers its users expanded capacity, and much faster access to their information.

“As a SaaS vendor, we share a strategic alignment with Rackspace around values for the highest level of customer service,” stated Mike McDerment, CEO, FreshBooks. “At FreshBooks we believe we are a service, not a technology. When you call us, you get a live person and a commitment to solving your problem. Over the years, Rackspace has consistently demonstrated to us the same focus on support and has enabled us to grow our business more quickly because we can concentrate on our core competencies, while Rackspace manages the technology. By moving to The Rackspace Cloud, we can continue to deliver more value to our customers at lower costs to ourselves and our customers.”

Since 2004, FreshBooks has been providing small and medium businesses, consultants, and freelancers with a fast, cost-effective and easy way to create a polished image for their business with a professional web-based invoicing, expense and time tracking service. Users can send invoices by email or ground mail and take advantage of features including recurring billing, employee timesheets, and project management features. Business professionals can customize the look of their billing systems and invoice templates. FreshBooks supports payments with plug-ins like PayPal, Authorize.Net, VeriSign, PSiGate, iTransact, Link Point and more. FreshBooks automatically creates invoices; sends late payment notifications; creates robust reports and can easily import/export data – all with a very simple and easy to use design.

“We are pleased to work with a fast-growing SaaS leader like FreshBooks who is constantly looking for ways to innovate and excel for their customers. We take away the headache of managing hardware to give them more time to develop and grow their business.” stated Emil Sayegh, General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud. “Hybrid hosting allows the Cloud to be used for scalable storage or compute power together with more traditional dedicated managed servers, which is the way we believe computing will be done in the future. I’m glad to see FreshBooks jumping on that train.”

FreshBooks hosts its applications on managed dedicated servers across two Rackspace data centers, for redundancy, and the company’s employee mailboxes are managed by Rackspace Email & Apps. By moving to The Rackspace Cloud, FreshBooks continues to offload non-strategic tasks that need to scale infinitely in order to focus more on their core business function of delivering high quality hosted bookkeeping services to business professionals.

About FreshBooks

FreshBooks, the leader in online invoicing and bookkeeping, helps professionals in over 100 countries save time, get paid faster, look professional and focus on what they love to do — their work. Read our customer survey results — 99% recommend FreshBooks. Our users are served by a tight-knit team of 31 dedicated individuals based in Toronto, Canada who’ve been at this since 2004.

About The Rackspace Cloud

The Rackspace Cloud provides on-demand scalable website, application and storage hosting backed by Fanatical Support®. Through its suite of cloud solutions, Cloud Sites™, Cloud Files™ and Cloud Servers, The Rackspace Cloud enables astute developers and IT managers to minimize the hassles, upfront investments and high costs associated with dedicated hardware while offering the ability to easily scale hosting resources. For more information about The Rackspace Cloud, visit www.rackspacecloud.com or call 1-877-934-0409.

About Rackspace Hosting

As the leader and specialist in hosting services, Rackspace® Hosting is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, integrating the industry’s best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable. A trusted partner to companies of all sizes, Rackspace enables IT departments to be more effective. Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support®, furthering the company’s mission to be one of the world’s greatest service companies. Rackspace is recognized as one of FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best companies to work for in the US, ranking number 43 on the list. Rackspace’s portfolio of hosted IT services includes Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Email and Apps. For more information on Rackspace Hosting please visit www.rackspace.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, any statements concerning expected development, performance or operational results related to any particular customer or customers of our customers associated with our hosting solutions; any other statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include issues relating to the performance of a customer’s configuration caused by forces outside of the control of Rackspace; changes in the economy, technological and competitive factors, regulatory factors, and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2009, filed with the SEC on May 12, 2009 and our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2009, which will be filed with the SEC prior to August 14, 2009. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

Just Launched: The Rackspace Cloud Tools Website

// August 25th, 2009 // Comments Off // Announcements, Community, Development

At The Rackspace Cloud, we believe that a key component to the growth of an open cloud is a strong cloud ecosystem.  Step one in this effort was the release of our APIs – and we didn’t build these alone. We asked our partners what they wanted and their feedback served as a key factor in driving this effort forward. We made these available as open source so anyone can incorporate them directly into their products.

Step two has been the ongoing joint innovation and collaboration with our partners.  To ensure we  build and provide all of the solutions required for customers to develop, deploy or manage their environments in the cloud, we rely heavily on our partners.  We’ve been actively working with our partners to develop the tools and applications that our customers and the market need today.   These partner solutions will make it easier for customers to utilize the cloud when it makes sense, and accelerate the pace of innovation in the marketplace.

Today, The Rackspace Cloud is taking another big step forward in an effort to encourage openness, innovation and collaboration in the cloud. We’re proud to announce the launch of Cloud Tools (tools.rackspacecloud.com), an online site that brings together tools, applications and services created for The Rackspace Cloud by our partners and the community of developers.

A little bit about Cloud Tools…

• - It includes offerings from Featured Partners who we’ve worked extensively with to define customer needs and build offerings to serve them.

• - It provides a venue for the Community to list the projects and solutions  they’re building.

• - It’s one destination for browsing and researching tools that extend the functionality of The Rackspace Cloud.

• - It offers a way to easily raise awareness about our partners’ tools and applications, driving more customers to their products. And by driving more customers to their products, we hope to encourage more innovation from the ecosystem.

Openness and collaboration will continue to define our engagement with our partners and the development community.  Should you wish to speak with the team, please send an email to cloudpartners@rackspacecloud.com or feel free to email me directly at jim.curry@rackspace.com.