Rackspace Cloud Hosting

Rackspace is used to augment the current IT department. They are used to manage and support Azure and some security services including firewalls and IPSec VPN termination. They assist with the support of process-oriented tasks like patching, setting up servers in Azure, support for network services in Azure, and setting up and tearing down of VPNs. They also provide redundancy to existing services.

Rackspace Cloud Hosting is utilized by our entire company to host our email needs. Especially with the number of remote workers we have, it was important to have an email provider that could be used equally in a controlled environment, such as the office, and by those remote workers scattered throughout the United States. This program does that and more, providing easy integration with email applications such as Outlook, while still having an in-browser login portal for workers that prefer to go that route.

Rackspace offers a wide array of cloud-based hosting services. We are currently just using Rackspace for email hosting. We use their email service for the whole business. We use Rackspace for email hosting because it is very flexible to run on Outlook, Apple Mail, etc., and can be accessed via a webmail URL. We use a SaaS company for our website currently, so with our email system being independent of that, we don’t have to worry about disruptions if we ever change providers.

Rackpace Cloud is being used in two ways in our company, for file hosting and for their Managed Cloud Hosting platform. We use it across the entire company, and rely heavily on the cloud-based cloud system for many important aspects of the company. The Managed Cloud Hosting Platform is vital to our presence online, and we rely on Rackspace to provide industry-leading uptime, and have been rarely disappointed.

I use Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to simply monitor my cloud server. I am able to set up alerts based on just about anything. A simple example is If the server is using more than x% of allocated RAM. Using these alerts I can better decide on which resources my server needs, and most importantly which resources it doesn't. Not to mention, Rackspace Cloud Monitoring will let me know if my site goes down the second it happens. This is much better than finding out from your customers or boss...trust me. On a side note, Rackspace also has great customer support and will do a lot to help you get back up and running when something breaks. This base level (yet effective) support is included at no additional cost in our cloud hosting plan. Although Rackspace prides itself on customers only paying for resources they use, there are many resources that don't need to be used. Just because you pay a big hosting bill each month doesn't mean that your business will be okay online. It really takes a lot of tinkering around to find ways to perform better with less.

We are an IT service company. We host our client custom web applications with a Rackspace managed cloud account. We use Rackspace's cloud monitoring as it's very helpful to our business. Rackspace's cloud monitoring service immediately send us notification emails if a service is down. For example, if an Apache service goes down or MySQL service goes down, we immediately get alerts from the monitoring service.