Rackspace Selected by British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) to Host for Website Peak Performance for Awards Season Traffic Spikes

Rackspace provides BAFTA with new public cloud-based IT services to help increase performance and flexibility while reducing costs

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr. 1, 2014-- Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, today announced that the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has selected the Rackspace public cloud to power its online presence and kick start the performance of a number of its websites, most significantly their Awards site which experiences significant peaks in traffic on Awards nights. BAFTA chose Rackspace for its team of specialists who provide award-winning Fanatical Support® and a competitive price per performance.

As part of the relationship, Rackspace has helped BAFTA move to a fully optimised cloud platform built on open standards. BAFTA now runs the majority of its external online services via the Rackspace public cloud so that services are delivered at a superior performance level. BAFTA's central website is currently being redeveloped and is set to launch on the Rackspace cloud in late summer 2014. This will complete the set of BAFTA sites hosted by Rackspace, providing the organisation with a complete hosted solution that improves efficiency and value for money.

Rackspace is also providing BAFTA with a dedicated Cloud Specialist as a resource to help with deployment of its websites and provide for the onboarding process to run as smoothly as possible in the cloud.

"After switching to Rackspace, busy periods such as during the 2014 British Academy Film Awards and Games Awards were a great success," said Kevin Price (BAFTA, COO). "Our dedicated Rackspace team manually monitored web traffic so capacity was scaled up and then back down again in real time. Where previously our site has occasionally underperformed during peaks in traffic, we're pleased to say that we received 100% uptime during our busiest season of the year and the excellent support we received from the Rackspace team was a huge reassurance on Awards night."

The servers provided by Rackspace offer 8GB of RAM and higher performance, which is anticipated to result in huge cost savings when the new www.bafta.org site launches this summer. The site currently relies solely on 24GBs physical servers, much more capacity than the not for profit organisation requires throughout the majority of the year.

Jeff Cotten, Managing Director International at Rackspace commented: "Working with a British institution like BAFTA has been a great experience and a real pleasure. As an independent charity BAFTA has some very specific cost saving goals to meet so it was great to be able to work so closely with them to help provide specialist approach and tailored product set they needed so they can focus on what they do best, promoting the arts in the UK."

About Rackspace

Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) is the global leader in hybrid cloud and founder of OpenStack®, the open-source operating system for the cloud. Hundreds of thousands of customers look to Rackspace to deliver the best-fit infrastructure for their IT needs, leveraging a product portfolio that allows workloads to run where they perform best-whether on the public cloud, private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of platforms. The company's award-winning Fanatical Support® helps customers successfully architect, deploy and run their most critical applications. Headquartered in San Antonio, TX, Rackspace operates data centres on four continents. Rackspace is featured on Fortune's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For and placed26thin 'The Sunday Times Best Companies To Work For' listing. For more information, visit www.rackspace.co.uk

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialise or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or operational results related to any particular customer or customers of our customers associated with our hosting solutions; any other statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include issues relating to the performance of a customer's configuration caused by forces outside of the control of Rackspace; changes in the economy, technological and competitive factors, regulatory factors, and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-K for the quarter and year ended December 31, 2013, filed with the SEC on March 3, 2014. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

Source: Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace Hosting
Zuzana Eden, 44-208-734-4043
zuzana.eden@rackspace.co.uk


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