Featured Host: Rackspace Managed Hosting
This month’s featured host is Rackspace Managed Hosting . We chose Rackspace for this month because they’ve done a great job as host to all iNet Interactive sites including Web Hosting Talk . Find out what Ryan Elledge, President of iNet Interactive has to say about the quality of service that Rackspace has provided. Then read the interview with Rackspace co-founder, Pat Condon.
Founded in 1998, Rackspace provides managed Web Hosting services to businesses of all sizes on the Windows, Linux and FreeBSD Platforms. There are over 550,000 domains in over 80 countries under the management of Rackspace, the first company in the world to focus exclusively on managed hosting. In addition, Rackspace guarantees 100% uptime and a one-hour hardware replacement, backed by more than 30 consecutive months of 100% network availability.
"Fanatical" Support
"Managed Servers Backed by Award-Winning Fanatical Support", this is the well suited trademark for Rackspace Managed Hosting. Why? Because they back it up. I asked Ryan Elledge how satisfied he is with Rackspace as the host for iNET Interactive, and why? "We have been more than pleased with the support and responsiveness of Rackspace with all of our hosting needs. No matter what our question or issue, no matter what time of the day or night, there always seems to be someone on staff that we can talk to that can answer us or handle our issue. I would say that Fanatical Support is more than a slogan. it’s a way of business for Rackspace, and for that, we are so thankful to be hosted with them."
Whenever I visit Rackspace.com, a live customer service representative pops up almost instantaneously. Support is provided 24x7x365. In addition, their support consists of certified Level Two and Level Three technical support engineers. And, get this, customers can even ask for advice, free of charge! Rackspace has been honored with several awards including "Microsoft Hosting Solutions Service Provider of the Year", "Linux Journal’s 2003 Readers’Choice Awards" and "InfoWorld 100 Award". Without any further ado, let’s meet Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace Managed Hosting! Condon is very involved in the business and focuses on strategic direction and marketing efforts but also on taking feedback from customers to help maintain and build on Rackspace’s "Fanatical Support".
WHT: Â Â I see you have a newly designed website, what was the motivation behind that?
Pat Condon: Â Â A number of things. First, we wanted to communicate our exclusive focus on managed hosting. One of the things that our customers have really been impressed with over the last few years is our deep expertise in managed hosting. We think this is the result of specializing. Second, we wanted to communicate our two different service offerings. Previously, we had a separate website for our Intensive Hosting service for customers running enterprise-class Windows-based applications. We wanted to combine our Intensive offering with our managed hosting offering to make it easier for our customer to choose the right service level for their business.
WHT: Â Â Why do you have a datacenter in London?
Pat Condon:   One thing we realized early on is that one of the benefits of the managed hosting model is that customers don’t need to be physically located close to their servers. As a result, we didn’t have to build dozens of datacenters all over the place. Instead, we could focus on centralizing the complexity of a data center to larger, regional data center facilities. The UK was a natural choice for serving Europe. There are a lot of cultural similarities to the US and the language is the same. The UK is one of the best wired countries in Europe as well, so Internet transit quality is very good.
WHT: Â Â Tell me about "Fanatical Support".
Pat Condon:   Fanatical Support was born out of our frustration in dealing with other service businesses. We asked ourselves early on, “What are all the things we can’t stand when dealing with service-based businessesâ€. The answers were things like “Waiting on holdâ€, “having to deal with an endless auto-attendantsâ€, and “not getting someone on the phone that was capable of solving our issue quicklyâ€. We promised ourselves that we’d never let these frustrations creep into our business.
When we started Rackspace, the service bar in the industry was extremely low. We didn’t want to compare ourselves to others in our industry because we wanted to strive for more than that. We wanted to be the best service company our customers had ever done business with. This philosophy permeates every part of Rackspace…from the sales process, support process, and billing process. This notion of Fanatically Supporting our customers has not just become something we strive for, it’s become our CULTURE. It’s become our mission to exceed our customer’s expectations every step of the way. It’s what guides every Rackspace employee to go above and beyond our customers’ expectations to deliver an extraordinary hosting experience.
WHT: Â Â How do you stay competitive in this very competitive market, what makes Rackspace stand out?
Pat Condon:   I think it’s our Fanatical Support culture that really makes us stand out. Our customers have told us over and over again that the experience they’ve had with us is like no other they’ve ever had. They tell their friends and colleagues about us and as a result, more than 50% of our new business comes from referrals.
As for how we stay competitive, our exclusive focus on managed hosting has allowed us to stay very competitive. When you compare us to a technology generalist like IBM or AT&T (both of whom have large managed hosting businesses), it’s pretty clear why specializing is so important. As a specialist we’ve developed deep expertise in specific areas that really matter to our hosting customers. We’re an inch wide and a mile deep. Our focus has allowed us to be very flexible in serving our customers with unique services that can’t be found anywhere else. If you needed to have heart surgery, you wouldn’t want to choose your family doctor, a general practitioner. You’d want to choose a heart specialist. We’ve found that our customers feel the same way about hosting. When their web environments are mission-critical, choosing a specialist makes a lot of sense.
WHT: Â Â Rackspace has 30 consecutive months of 100% network availability, is that right? What do you credit that to? On top of great technology and specialization, however, we have some great network engineers that have developed and maintain one of the most robust networks in the world. Our network uptime is really a testament to their unrelenting passion for running a world-class network and their Fanatical behavior when it comes to unexpected network activity. WHT: Â Â Are all of your support personnel at least Certified Level II Support Engineers? WHT: Â Â Is it difficult to find the quality of employees that Rackspace looks for? WHT: Â Â Where do you see Rackspace and managed web hosting in the next 5 years? WHT: Â Â A lot of businesses are outsourcing work to other countries, does Rackspace have any plans to outsource support overseas? WHT: Â Â What is it about your company, or what event are you most proud of? WHT: Â Â Thank you for taking the time out today to be interviewed, we appreciate it.
Pat Condon: Â Â It’s true, we have had more than 30 months of 100% network availability. Well, I think because we specialize in managed hosting, we’re able to have a deep understanding in the core areas of our business, one of which is our network. We’ve had a long standing relationship with Cisco and we’re one of only a handful of Cisco-powered networks in the world.
Pat Condon: Â Â Yes, we have an internal certification program as well as external vendor certification programs.
Pat Condon:   The hosting business is a service business. Service businesses are ultimately based on people. As a result, the quality of service a company can provide really rests on the quality of people at a company. We’re incredibly selective with our new employees, whom we call RACKERS. We hire great RACKERS that share our values of striving to deliver a superior customer experience. So to answer your question, yes, it is difficult to find RACKERS!
Pat Condon:   Our Intensive service offering has really gotten a lot of traction and has been a huge part of our growth over the last 18 months. I see us continuing to grow in that direction, which really involves going deeper into the applications our customers are running. With our Intensive service we not only guarantee infrastructure availability, but we also guarantee availability of the application layer – a key difference that I think we’re the only ones delivering on today. This application availability guarantee coupled with our proactive service level management has really allowed us to serve even the extremely large enterprises looking for 100% availability across the board. I think over the next 5 years hosting SLAs will move beyond the traditional infrastructure layer. You’ll see SLAs around business processes instead of infrastructure. There are dozens of activities that are necessary to support deeper SLAs, and I think you’ll see more providers begin to build these capabilities out.
Pat Condon: Â Â I think that outsourcing activities to people that can get it done faster, cheaper or better is just fine. Picking the right activities to outsource, however, is critical. The last thing that we would outsource is our service and support, which is what I understand more and more hosters are doing. Since we believe that our core competency is service and support, it would be the last thing we would outsource. Payroll, on the other hand, is not a core competency of ours. While we have a large accounting department that is technically capable of doing our payroll, we choose to outsource this ancillary activity to someone who can do it better and cheaper than we can do it ourselves. So again, outsourcing is great. Picking the right activities to outsource is the real trick.
Pat Condon:   Customer service was not originally our focus early on in 1999. We quickly realized, however, that it was the thing that REALLY mattered in this business. This realization was a turning point for us and we’ve focused on it ever since. At the end of the day, our customers choose us because they want a good service experience. A good experience leads to loyal customers that want to buy more services. This is the number one reason that our customer base actually GROWS every month!!! Most hosters think of monthly customer revenue churn. I think we’re the only hosting company in the industry that actually has a customer base that grows organically, month over month…before a single new customer sale is made. This is an amazing accomplishment our RACKERS have made happen and I’m incredibly proud of it.
Pat Condon:   Thank you. It’s been great talking to you.
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