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By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
September 10, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- IT hosting provider Rackspace (rackspace.com) issued its earnings report for the second quarter of 2008 and held the first earnings conference call since its IPO, which took place in August of this year.
Both the company's earnings report and the call focused on the growth Rackspace has experienced in the just-completed quarter, as well as in the past year, pointing to revenue of $130.8 million in Q2 2008, an increase of 9.4 percent over the previous quarter and 55.7 percent over the second quarter of 2007.
The complete report is posted on the company's website.
"We delivered strong growth despite a challenging macroeconomic environment, which demonstrates the strength of Rackspace's fanatical support and its ability to win and keep customers in a tough climate," said Lanham Napier, president and chief executive officer, in the press release that accompanied the results. "We are seeing significant global growth, and we will continue to make disciplined, long-term investments in order to capitalize on the demand for hosting."
The company also saw growth in customers, which increased by 6.1 percent from quarter to quarter to 33,600; servers, which increased 6.7 percent to total 42,400; and facilities, with the opening of a new UK data center in June and a new Hong Kong data center earlier this week.
According to Rackspace, the IPO raised $144.9 million, which will be used primarily to fund the company's growth, including investments in infrastructure.
On the conference call, the company's first, Napier expanded on what the company considers the keys to its competitive advantage, foremost among which is its oft-repeated focus on "fanatical support."
"Complete customer satisfaction is our sole ambition," he says, "and anything short of that is insufficient."
He says the customer support claims aren't just lip service, and that they're ingrained at a cultural level within the company. Customer satisfaction, he says, leads directly to sustainable revenue.
The hour-long call will be available for streaming from the company's website until midnight on September 24.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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