That’s right, for the third year now, Rackspace is now accepting applications for the 2009 FANATI® Award for Outstanding Customer Service. For three years now, Rackspace has awarded The FANATI to the one customer who best demonstrates ‘Fanatical Support’ when it comes to their customers.

Here at Rackspace, we’ve built a reputation based on service, known to our customers as Fanatical Support®; our anytime, anywhere, any way approach to customer service. And we know we’re not the only ones who put customer needs first. That’s why we created The FANATI in 2007 to recognize one of our customers for valuing customer service as much as we do.

The contest consists of two rounds of judging (judging by a panel of experts and a customer satisfaction survey). Customers first complete the application process located on the MyRackspace® customer portal. The past two years, the award has only been available to our Managed Hosting customers. But this year we are opening it to all US-based customers including Cloud and Email & Apps customers. Those customers will be able to access the application online here.

The other thing we are changing this year is the format of the application. No longer is it just a written application answering a bunch of questions. This year we want to make it personal and with a touch of creativity. That is why we are only accepting video applications! All our customers need to do is create a short (less than five minutes) video explaining what they do and how they exemplify outstanding customer service. It should be interesting none the less.

So if you’re a customer, and you think your customer service is pretty good…award winning even…then log on to the MyRackspace portal or click the link on your control panel, and let us hear from you.

For more information on The FANATI, click here, or leave us a comment below if you have any questions.

Rackspace held a System Administration breakfix contest at the 2009 Red Hat Summit in Chicago pitting the top Red Hat Certified professionals against each other for the chance to win prizes and win bragging rights. During the two day contest, forty-seven participants worked to solve the four identified “breaks” within the fifteen minutes allotted. The problems, listed below, were chosen as representative of issues Sys Admins in a hosting environment must be able to resolve on a daily basis. The contestants who resolved the most problems in the shortest times respectively won first, second and third place.

With encouragement from @devrandy, Randy Russell, the Director of Certification for Red Hat, there was quite a heated competition among the contestants for the top three spots. The winners respectively won one of three prizes: 1st Place, an Acer Aspire 5155; 2nd Place, $100 ThinkGeek gift certificate; 3rd Place, 8GB USB drive. Our winners were:

1st Place – Alex Davies (also a Red Hat 2009 RHCE of the Year!) – 4 correct solutions in 12 minutes

2nd Place – Hai Wu – 3 correct solutions in 15 minutes

3rd Place – Dave Johnson – 3 correct solutions in 15 minutes

Of the forty-seven contestants, only Alex successfully solved all four problems in the allotted time. Thirty-two correctly solved Problem One. Eleven solved Problem Two. Three solved Problem Three and four contestants solved Problem Four. Congratulations to our winners!

Rackspace Trainer Mike Roberts (@soopurman on Twitter) provides a multi-part screen cast of the four challenge questions and provides insight in troubleshooting and solving each. Below, Mike’s screen cast is broken into segments for each problem in the challenge. These are interspersed with the actual questions from the breakfix challenge for reference. Mike begins with a brief introduction to the breakfix:

Rackspace Breakfix Challenge Instructions

This exercise is meant to approximate the types of problems that Rackers solve for our customers with Fanatical Support every day.  As such, the idea is that you should attempt to detect and correct any possible misconfigurations, but not drastically alter the basic setup, nor replace the actual services being used.

We will give you up to 15 minutes to complete the following problems. When you are finished, ask a Racker to record your name, the problems you fixed, and your completion time.  On Friday we will award prizes for the fastest successful completion of all challenge problems.  Good Luck!

1. The IP address 192.168.0.253 is accessible by others on the network, but this machine cannot succesfully ‘ping’ it.  Figure out why and fix it.

2. This machine is supposed to offer both anonymous vsftpd and anonymous rsync services, but clients are complaining they cannot connect to either one.  For example, the command “rsync rsync://localhost” should display a share called “challenge” but it does not.  Figure out why and fix it.

3. The default page of the web site running on this machine is supposed to simply display the word “success” but it does not. Figure out why and fix it.

4. The password for the user named “rack” is correctly set to “rackspace” but this user still cannot login.  Figure out why and fix it.

Mike concludes the presentation of the solution to the breakfix challenge with a special invitation to System Administrators who may want to pursue this kind of activity on a regular basis:

For more information about Rackspace and available careers  please visit our Career portal: http://RackspaceCareers.com.

Fred Reichheld, Baine fellow and author of The Ultimate Question, is an expert on measuring customer loyalty. He’s also a member of the Rackspace Board of Directors. We were fortunate to catch Fred as he left our annual board meeting – here, he talks about how customer loyalty impacts profitability and how companies can measure loyalty using the Net Promoter Score.

Those of  you who know Rackspace, know that we strive to be the best service company in the world. One way of improving on that was our implementation of the Net Promoter Score, created by Mr. Reichheld. You can read more about that in his book, The Ultimate Question.

We here at Rackspace would like to send a big “CONGRATULATIONS” to our friends at Zappos. Today, Zappos celebrates their 10 year anniversary. Zappos is similar to Rackspace in that they are incredibly dedicated to maintaining their unique culture—one which focuses on their employees—all which benefits their customers through great service.

Watch our video below!

Fanatical Support® is what we do, and for Rackspace customer Laughing Squid, we’ve been doing it for 10 years.  Happy 10th Anniversary, Laughing Squid!  We’re pretty sure we owe you something made out of tin, or is 10 years aluminum?
Check out the blog post from Laughing Squid here.

The Rackspace engineering groups have been busy in our data centers. We’re growing and improving our facilities every day.

As noted in our recent press release, we have partnered with DuPont Fabros to expand our footprint in Northern Virginia. This partnership gives us access to a world-class facility that is backed by some of the smartest engineers and operators in the business. More importantly, it will give our customers more options for multi-site and DR deployments. We plan to have this new facility online this summer.

We’ve also been hard at work on our DFW data center. We recently opened an expansion that adds just over 22,000 sq ft of raised floor and raises the total capacity of the site to more than 75,000 sq ft. The work in Dallas goes well beyond just adding floor space. We’ve been adding capacity to all of our infrastructure as well. We have added 16 Megawatts of generator capacity and have nearly completed an overhaul of the HVAC system that more than doubles capacity and leverages new, more energy efficient chillers.

These new developments, when combined with our London and Hong Kong facilities launched in 2008, ensure that we will continue to provide the flexibility and capacity our growing customer base requires. They also provide a modern, robust platform for deploying our expanding set of cloud offerings. Exciting times!

On February 10th, just four days before Valentine’s Day, one of our customers, Golden State Communications, showed us the love and posted an amazing blog post about our service.  This all goes back to our goal to become one of the World’s Greatest Service Companies.

Read the full post here.

Rackspace recently gave our second annual Fanati™ award. The award honors the one customer that has best demonstrated excellence when it comes to customer service. Douglas Hanna, one of the contest judges, has written a special guest post about the contest and the winner.

A Fanatical Competition

As a customer service consultant and journalist, I have the opportunity to work with and report on a variety of companies of all shapes, sizes, and specialties.

I first started covering Rackspace in July 2006 and have enjoying following company since then. I have had the opportunity to meet and interview several Rackers and when I was asked to participate in the process of deciding which of Rackspace’s 31,000 customers would win THE FANATI contest award in September, I gladly accepted.

THE FANATI contest has a simple mission: to recognize Rackspace customers who value customer service as much as Rackspace does.

With that goal and my understanding of what Fanatical Support meant to me in mind, I reviewed a small stack of finalist applications and graded each finalist on a scale of one to ten in five areas. To me, Fanatical Support isn’t about responding to emails in a timely manner or being polite (that’s expected in today’s market). Instead, Fanatical Support is about going the extra mile. The companies that have set themselves apart as exceptional service providers are the companies that consistently go the extra mile for each and every one of their customers. (read more…)

Order by phone or online?  Pickup or delivery?  Generally speaking, there isn’t one way of doing things.  We all have preferences and priorities. This is something lots of us have thought about over the years at Rackspace.  How do each of our customers want to be supported?  Does it depend on the situation they’re in? 

From my experience, each customer defines Fanatical Support a little different.  For some it’s about being able to call at 3am and have a team of Linux experts eager to troubleshoot an unusual Apache error.  For others it’s about having the power to go into the MyRackspace customer portal to create a snapshot of their virtual server. This is one of the beautiful things about Fanatical Support; it represents many things to many customers.  And so, having options is very important.

We’ve heard consistently from customers that while they love having a team of Rackers available to support them around the clock, many prefer to just take care of some things themselves. Self-service matters at Rackspace! Self-service is about offering choices that make hosting easier and more efficient.  If a customer has the expertise and would prefer to just knock out a quick change themselves, then they should have the tools available to easily make this change.  This is something we understand and have a fleet of folks working to deliver. (read more…)

I’ve been at Rackspace for a while. People ask me from time to time to explain exactly what Fanatical Support is. Typically, I try my best to walk through the basics of our approach, philosophy, etc. The challenge has always been that it’s hard to do so without getting into the technical jargon. For most folks, this causes eyes to glaze over and typically buries the important information under a series of acronyms and such in the listener’s minds. So, recently, I’ve tried to find other examples – even outside of the Rack – to help paint the proper picture.

Rackspace doesn’t have the market cornered on great service in San Antonio. There are businesses, and more commonly, individual people that exhibit the same traits we look for in Rackers. Not only was a recent experience my family had an example of this, but it serves as an excellent, non-technical, illustration of what Fanatical Support really looks like. (read more…)