The infrastructure needs of a SaaS application are tied to its purpose, functionality and long-term strategy. There are no one size fits all solutions. So, before I tell you that we’re the perfect fit for you, without knowing you or your requirements, here are a few of our current customers with the truth about what it’s like hosting their SaaS applications at Rackspace and how they’ve benefited from our relationship:

Better Performance: “Our entire environment must be on-demand…That means the underlying infrastructure must be able to expand as needed.”
Venkata Yella, Cloud Engineering Lead, X.commerce
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More Choice: “The ability to mix your dedicated and cloud hardware in a hybrid environment is a really exciting offering and a perfect mix of dedicated and private cloud — it lets you go into cloud in stages.” Peter Jacoby, CTO, Jobs2web
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Enhanced Agility: “Rackspace has been an incredibly valuable partner, allowing Marketo to scale operations quickly with minimal investments in internal operational resources.” Nick Bonfiglio, Vice President of Operations, Marketo
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Fanatical Support®: “They are there for us whenever we need them. Rackspace is an integral part in providing support to our IT team and we really appreciate it.” Mario Spanicciati, Executive Vice President of Operations, BlackLine Systems
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Thousands of customers trust us with their business not just because we have lots of floor space, servers and cables. Customers trust their apps to Rackspace for:

• Flexibility: Service that lets you trade in the large upfront capital expense of standing up SaaS app architecture in exchange for a fixed monthly operating expense.
• Expertise: Our team consists of seasoned web scale engineers versed in the intricacies of running large-scale applications.
• Support: When you pick up the phone to call us about your application, we pick up the phone to listen. Support is the core piece of what makes Rackspace different.

Now that you know the cold, hard truth about hosting your SaaS application at Rackspace, contact us to discuss your specific needs and how Rackspace can help.

If you’re looking for more SaaS content, be sure to watch Kevin’s previous video where he talked about three benefits of pod architecture for SaaS environments. Learn more about hosting SaaS applications at Rackspace.

Faster provisioning: Pods designed with identical architecture make setting up new users easier than having to customize configurations for individual users. You can leverage this standardized deployment architecture to help automate the provisioning of new users.

User customization: Individual pods can be customized with additional capacity to meet the unique needs of your users. Users needing additional computing power/capacity can get those extra resources in their pod without initiating infrastructure-wide changes. Segmenting a specific user on a single pod away from your other customers can eliminate the noisy neighbor effect. This isolates this noisy neighbor’s traffic, thereby mitigating the impact to your other users.

Improved scalability: As opposed to having to beef up your entire infrastructure to accommodate scaling for a single user, pod architecture allows you to drop in resources and remove them as needed on a user-by-user basis. This not only saves resources but also reduces your overall cost of doing business because additional resources are only deployed when and where they are needed.

We find that pod architecture is a great fit for SaaS applications at Rackspace that need maximum flexibility to accommodate various user types. However, there is no one size-fits-all answer. Our team can talk you through your specific needs to find the layout that’s right for you.

If you’re looking for more SaaS content, be sure to watch Kevin’s previous video where he talked about the Critical Application Services offering at Rackspace. You can also check out his next video where he discusses the advantages of hosting your SaaS application at Rackspace. Learn more about hosting SaaS applications at Rackspace.

A brick and mortar might contract a property management firm to keep the grass cut, the doors operational and the windows fixed. For high-volume websites and web applications, there’s Critical Application Services at Rackspace.

Like a professional property management firm, Critical Application Services combines a suite of tools and actions to help websites put their best face forward, remain operational and stay open for business. The service consists of three components that are crucial to the success of your website and the integrity of your brand:

Application monitoring: Web-scale engineers keep a constant watch on site operations. You’ll know in less than five minutes if there’s an issue and you have a team of experienced engineers ready to get you back up and running.

Deeper visibility: User analytics, incident detection, real-time transaction level monitoring and diagnostic performance reports help you see how your application or website is running when there’s no fire to put out. Our team can also help you find ways to use this data to further optimize your infrastructure for better future performance.

Aggressive Service Level Agreement (SLA): When we say 100 percent production platform uptime, we mean it. We back it with a double your money back in service level credit. Period. You can stop worrying about the site going down and focus on activities like marketing and product development that grow your business instead of just maintaining operations.

Not all businesses need a professional property management company to oversee their physical presence and not all websites need the benefits of Rackspace Critical Application Services. The typical Critical Applications Services customers are high-volume website operators and businesses who deliver mission critical web applications where failure is not an option.

If you’re looking for more SaaS content, be sure to watch Kevin’s previous video where he talked about the importance of consistency in your SaaS configuration. You can also check out his next video where he discusses three benefits of pod architecture for SaaS environments. Learn more about hosting SaaS applications at Rackspace.

Regardless of the number of servers you have, maintaining consistency in your hardware and how you name it is essential to supporting scale and running an efficient IT operation. Your gear should be consistent in the following areas:

Hardware and Operating System
If you have hardware from multiple brands, all with different software, different operating systems and different components, just trying to figure out what and where a problem is and how to fix it for a particular machine can be a nightmare. By standardizing on the same hardware and operating system throughout your infrastructure, makes quirks easier to recognize, troubleshoot and fix. This also gives us the ability to quickly add new identical hardware to your hosted SaaS environment when needed without worrying about how, or if, it will impact other pieces of your infrastructure.

Server Naming Conventions
Ideally, you’d name your servers to be memorable and informative for IT and end users. If you have a one-man shop, and your one man leaves his position, will the next admin be able to decipher that server’s purpose by its name?

Consistency in your environment paves the way for a stronger relationship and makes it easier for us to help you achieve your SaaS-related goals.

If you’re looking for more SaaS content, be sure to watch Kevin’s previous video where he talked about the basics of scaling your SaaS environment. You can also check out his next video where he discusses the Critical Application Services offering at Rackspace. Learn more about hosting SaaS applications at Rackspace.

Since scaling your app is a key concern regardless of whether you’re a start-up or “grown-up” SaaS app, I want to make sure you understand the differences and how they impact your growth strategy:

Imagine a car that can only fit four people, but you have a family of eight. You can buy more four-person cars and link them together in an extended caravan or you can buy a bigger vehicle to accommodate everyone.

Horizontal scaling is akin to the caravan rolling down the highway. Horizontally scaling addresses capacity needs by adding more resources to the existing architecture. You can add as many cars as you need to accommodate the family as it grows.

Vertical scaling is buying the bigger car. A vertically scaled architecture adds resources: more memory, more storage, faster processors, etc. to the existing architecture. It’s like expanding the current vehicle from a four- to an eight-seater without having to re-adjust the mirrors.

Do you really need to take all eight family members out every time you leave the house? Is there a gas savings between the two methods? What is the cost comparison? These are the same types of questions SaaS businesses face in deciding whether to build their app to scale by replicating identical servers with horizontal architecture or to grow the servers in place with vertical scaling or a combination of both. The top reasons customers bring their apps to Rackspace for SaaS application hosting revolve around looking for ways to plan for efficient scale or trying to harness a SaaS application that has already become a scaling headache.

Be sure to check out Kevin’s next video where he discusses the importance of being consistent in your SaaS environment. Learn more about hosting SaaS applications at Rackspace.