RackspaceCloud Review

As the name pretty plainly suggests, RackspaceCloud is the cloud hosting division of Rackspace—the well-known San Antonio, Texas company that was founded in 1998 and quickly become a leading web host provider with more than 99,000 customers worldwide and nearly 3,000 employees. RackspaceCloud was first conceived in 2004, but was not fully established under its present name until 2009. The idea behind RackspaceCloud was to bring the clustering, load-balancing, and virtualization capabilities enjoyed by large enterprise customers to small to mid-sized business customers. The idea seems to have paid off. RackspaceCloud now has over 80,000 very well satisfied cloud computing customers.

RackspaceCloud offers three different hosting products. “Cloud Servers” provides a completely scalable cloud-driven platform of virtualized servers with root access and the ability to customize and spin up new instances in minutes. “Cloud Files” offers elastic online file storage and content delivery networks.

“Cloud Sites” provides a robust and easy to use web hosting platform with built in redundancy, clustering, and automatic scaling so that server capacity is never an issue. Furthermore, unlike many cloud hosting platforms that require you to use custom code and architecture, Cloud Sites is built on existing web standards and employs industry standard technology. This means that your applications can run with little, if any, modification and that you get the benefits of a cloud platform without the hassles of coding custom APIs or data schemes.