Rackspace Hosting, the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry, today announced from SXSW 2010 the launch of Rackspace Media Services.

Company Releases Direct-to-Consumer Web Infrastructure Offering for the Music Recording Industry

March 16, 2010 – Austin, TX — Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry, today announced from SXSW 2010 the launch of Rackspace Media Services. This Enterprise-level solution will provide an open source, direct-to-consumer (D2C) web infrastructure for music recording labels and other media segments that need to accelerate content delivery online, scale rapidly to respond to fan demand, and create new revenue streams.

Artist’s websites are becoming increasingly complex with eCommerce, user generated content, social media and custom applications, forcing record labels to act as IT “experts” and distracting them from their core business. As a result, many artists are turning to third-party digital solution providers for online music distribution, merchandise sales and concert ticket promotion – cutting record labels off from significant revenue and branding opportunities.

Working closely with industry leaders and experts, and utilizing extensive experience building and managing complex web infrastructures, the Rackspace Media Services solution exists specifically to address the business and technology needs of this industry.

“Music recording labels have traditionally focused their resources on non-differentiating IT tasks or have outsourced their D2C applications to third parties in an attempt to support hundreds of Artists’ complex sites and infrastructures. Rackspace gives labels the freedom to focus on differentiating their businesses via application development and the support of business processes to meet the needs of both the Artist and the fan,” said Wes Laird, Director of Rackspace Media Services, Rackspace Hosting.

Rackspace Media Services’ flexible, open source architecture, scalable platform and stable pricing model make this a unique solution for the music recording industry. Specific components include:

• Rackspace Strategy and Implementation Team: A dedicated team that delivers a scalable D2C website infrastructure backed by URL uptime service level agreements.
• Web Scale Engineering: The industry’s best LAMP technology professionals with years of training and “in-the-trenches” experience on the job 24x7x365 to assist with root-cause analysis and remediation and to keep websites online.
• Real-time 24×7 Proactive Monitoring and Consultation: URL and Device Monitoring provide alerting and troubleshooting capabilities along with proactive trend analysis to prevent website outages. Advanced website reporting and analytics are included.
• Release Engineering, Change Management and Load Testing:  A structured process to identify and prevent application performance problems prior to live production allowing for seamless push of code changes and simplified rollback.
• Optional Server Burst Architecture: Additional infrastructure capacity to quickly address the inevitable unplanned traffic spikes that come with success and growth.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry. The San Antonio-based company provides its customers Fanatical Support ® in their portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing and Email and Apps. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

For Media Inquiries:
Rachel Ferry
Rackspace Corporate Communications
210 312 3732
Rachel.Ferry@rackspace.com

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