Rackspace Story: Bank to the Future

Twitter is amazing, isn’t it? As the guy behind @RackspaceUK, it gives me the chance to meet and talk to our amazing customers (that’s you!). That’s how we started tweeting with @banktothefuture, and I asked CEO Simon Dixon to share his Rackspace story.

So, who are you?

We’re BankToTheFuture.com, and we help businesses with CrowdInvesting.

Crowd-what now?

We help businesses raise finance from a crowd of investors online. Essentially we have taken all the processes used to raise billions for large companies, stripped out all the costs, taken it online and made it accessible for smaller businesses seeking smaller sums.

We allow anybody to be an investor starting from as little as £10, meaning that people decide which businesses get funded rather than just rich people, banks and venture capitalists.

People can be their own online dragons and invest in private companies for either monthly income or capital growth.

That sounds pretty cool. What do you need the cloud for then?

We are in a business that needs to scale fast and we deal with a lot of traffic from investors and businesses, we need to minimise downtime as it could cost our customers investment and this needs to be flexible as we scale the traffic to the website.

As we get press releases frequently that drive a lot of traffic (For example Sir Richard Branson commented about us in the Telegraph recently) we need to be able to handle that traffic and the cloud gives us the flexibility we need.

Nice! A celeb name drop always spikes the traffic ;) Why did you choose Rackspace?

We switched to Rackspace after being unsatisfied with our previous server provider. The main thing for us is the managed service where we know any time we can contact Rackspace and get the answer we need. The customer service is one of the main reasons we use Rackspace. When we need help they are always there with a fast solution.

We do love our #FanaticalSupport!

We also manage a test server so we can release new version of the site in a test environment for bug testing before we release to tha main server allowing us to minimse downtime as we release new code every week.

We switched servers about 6 months ago. Best thing we ever did. We have been fully stable ever since.

For businesses that are looking to scale and need a fast and effective level of support, there is no other choice.

Thanks for sharing your Rackspace story with us, Simon!

If you would like to share your Rackspace story, send an email to twitter@rackspace.co.uk.