Rackspace built its whole company around a promise it called Fanatical Support. Customers rented dedicated machines in Rackspace data centers. They paid extra for a team that managed those machines day and night and answered the phone when they broke. When Rackspace went public in August 2008, the financial system was weeks from collapse. Amazon's new cloud was also starting to change what hosting meant.

Three Students in San Antonio

Three Trinity University students, Richard Yoo, Dirk Elmendorf and Pat Condon, started the company in San Antonio in 1998. Investor Graham Weston soon joined to lead it. Their bet was that most businesses did not want to run their own servers. Service would set a hosting company apart from its rivals. Rackspace grew quickly by serving small and midsize businesses that had no IT staff.

OpenStack, Apollo and Back

Rackspace priced its IPO at $12.50 a share in August 2008 on the New York Stock Exchange. It launched a cloud business, and in 2010 it co-founded the OpenStack project with NASA. Competition from Amazon, Microsoft and Google squeezed it. Apollo took Rackspace private in 2016 for about $4.3 billion, and it returned to the public market in 2020. Today it mostly helps customers run workloads on the big public clouds.

Cover: Moonrise, George Inness. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a moonlit night sky (space).