Fanatical Support At The App Layer!

Websites remain one of the most essential business, marketing and revenue-generating tools out there, but there are a  host of other applications that are just as important. With Critical Application Services, we bring Fanatical Support deeper into the infrastructure stack by adding application-layer support. This means we will not stop at the operating system on customer servers; we will bring support and services all the way through the LAMP stack, Java, IIS and .net layer.

Opening Up To The Open Cloud!

The Web Scale Engineers’ skills extend far beyond just the websites that are hosted on Rackspace’s dedicated gear. With the introduction of the Rackspace open cloud powered by OpenStack we saw an opportunity to bring that highest level of support to our customers with cloud accounts and customers with a cloud/dedicated hybrid environment. We can now proactively monitor infrastructure performance across all platforms at Rackspace, giving our customers a single pane of glass view into even the most distributed and complex environments. But we didn’t stop there!

Failure Is Not An Option!

We understand that web-based applications have become so crucial to every aspect of global business that latency, downtime and failure are not an option. For those applications we offer the industry-best 100 percent production platform uptime guarantee. We don’t just say it will be up, we mean it! We are so confident in our ability to keep your application up and running that we stand behind this guarantee with a two times SLA credit. Sounds crazy? Simply put, we believe in the skills of our Web Scale Engineers, the quality of our tools and our passion for Fanatical Support, and so can you!

Now Offering 30GB Instances

The 30GB instance comes with 1.2TB of disk and is targeted at customers that have database nodes and customers that have CPU, disk or memory intensive applications.

Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Web Edition for Windows Cloud Servers

Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Web Edition offers most of the functionality of Microsoft SQL Standard Edition but at a lower cost. Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Web Edition is designed for companies who need to support public facing, high availability websites and applications.  It offers the needed balance of availability, scalability, and manageability at a low cost.  Common use cases include:

· Hosting websites and web applications (public facing)
· Developing and deploying websites and web applications
· Supporting web services

SQL Server 2008 Web Edition may not be used to support line-of-business applications (e.g. Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Management, SharePoint, and other similar applications) due to Microsoft licensing restrictions.

To find out which SQL Edition is right for you, click here.

4 New Operating System Distributions for Linux Cloud Servers

We added RedHat Enterprise (RHEL) 6.1, CentOS 6.0, Ubuntu 11.10, and openSUSE 12 to the family of Linux operating systems that we offer.

To our Cloud Servers customers, thank you for entrusting Rackspace with your business. We truly appreciate your business and I want to personally thank you for partnering with us.

Please continue to provide your feedback here as we add additional features and work to make Cloud Servers better for you.

Today Rackspace is extending to the UK the new cloud category we defined here in the states last December – Managed Cloud.  Cloud Servers with a managed service level marries our industry-leading 24×7 managed service on dedicated hosting with our highly scalable on-demand Cloud Servers. The end result is a premier offering allowing your business to spend less time worrying about infrastructure and instead more time focusing on the core business.

Here at Rackspace we have designed and built our company behind one underlying mission: to be regarded as one of the world’s great service companies. On the dedicated hosting side of Rackspace, we have provided managed service levels since the inception of Rackspace. We revolutionized this concept on dedicated hosting and today we are bringing it to our UK cloud.

We constantly hear business owners and executives say, “I really want to use the cloud, but I don’t want to administer the servers” or “I just don’t have the resources to manage the cloud infrastructure I would need.” Now, those businesses can get the help that they want and need.

You can think of Managed Cloud as the equivalent of having an entire Sys Admin team managing and monitoring your infrastructure 24x7x365, at a fraction of the cost of hiring your own staff to do the job. In addition this dedicated team will provide support all the way up the stack, including OS Support and Application Level Support and technical advice. Tired of getting paged in the middle of the night? Let us handle those hassles.

For more information, please visit the UK website.

Check the video below to see what Rackspace leaders have to say about this launch:

We first announced Ubuntu 10.10 images available for Cloud Servers back in October.  Today, we are excited to announce that we are supporting Ubuntu 10.10 on Linux Cloud Servers with a managed service level. Now you can be assured the best support in the cloud on your Ubuntu 10.10 images.

When we launched our new service offering on December 14, 2010, Rackspace defined a new category of hosting – Managed Cloud.   The response to this new offering has been tremendous.  Just five weeks after the launch, customers have purchased hundreds of Cloud Servers with a managed service level.  However, we don’t measure our success in terms of sales.

We measure our success based on whether or not our customers are willing to recommend Rackspace.  And so far indications are good.   Check out these comments:

If you are interested in Managed Cloud with Ubuntu or any of the OS’s we support , we are running a promotion that ends at the end of this month – Get Managed Cloud today and enjoy up to $300 in savings:

Stay tuned to the blog for more updates on our Managed Cloud offering!

SQL Server 2008 R2 provides a secure, scalable and highly available information platform that is fully integrated with Microsoft Office, offers industry leading business intelligence capabilities with a low total cost of ownership.

Now millions of Windows developers have a way to develop on top of the cloud using Microsoft SQL. Couple that with our Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Plug-In and our Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise images and the Rackspace Cloud is now fully ready for application development based on the .NET platform.

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition starts at $0.72 per hour in addition to the base Windows Cloud Server utility charges.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We hope SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition will make life a little easier for those of you looking to take advantage of SQL Server for Cloud Servers for Windows.