Rackspace

Overview

Rackspace was founded in 1998 and is a well-known managed hosting provider. In 2005, the company decided to branch out into the emerging cloud computing space and launched at set of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings known as Mosso.com. Since then, they've evolved their offering and strategy, and pulled it all together under the umbrella of the Rackspace Cloud.

The Rackspace Cloud is a suite of three hosting products designed to quickly provide customers with:

• web hosting -- Cloud Sites
• servers -- Cloud Servers
• storage -- Cloud Files

These infrastructure services can be used together or separately as required by the customer.

Value Proposition

Cloud Sites is billed as a "load-and-go" platform that provides essentially unlimited scalability for web sites hosted on the platform. Rackspace handles the server administration and delivers it on a cost-effective basis. They can even manage the billing back to a customer's own clients.

With Cloud Server, users get a cost-effective (by the hour or monthly) way to customize, provision, and manage servers quickly and easily and with full root access to the Linux servers.

With Cloud Files, customers get a reliable, scalable, and affordable storage solution for backing up and archiving static media.

Products & Services

• Cloud Sites are virtual pools of servers that enable web hosting in the cloud. Architected to allow applications to run with little (or no) modification, it's billed as "a completely load-and-go platform" designed to host highly scalable web sites.
• Cloud Servers are virtualized Linux server instances that provide instant compute capacity as needed for web sites or applications. Technical users launch, maintain, and control the servers with full root access and pay on an hourly basis for the amount of memory required.
• Cloud Files provide unlimited storage backup and archiving for all types of media content. It leverages Limelight Network's content delivery platform to speed content to users.