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Rackspace Celebrates Six-Month Anniversary of OpenStack, Backed By Over 40 Cloud Computing Industry Leaders

In just six short months the OpenStack community has grown to include 40 member companies, all in an effort to fight proprietary cloud stacks

SAN ANTONIO, TX, – January 18, 2011 – Today Rackspace Hosting, (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, celebrates the six-month anniversary of OpenStack, the open source cloud project started by Rackspace and NASA. In just six short months, the OpenStack community has grown to forty plus companies, all working together to fight the emergence of proprietary cloud stacks and create a standard way to connect clouds and move apps freely. As OpenStack continues its success and matures, Rackspace plans to continue to implement OpenStack throughout the Rackspace portfolio.

"OpenStack has seen an incredibly fast amount of interest in the cloud community, drawing in many of the key and more interesting players, even people who ostensibly would compete with OpenStack," said Michael Cote, analyst at RedMonk. "This new community has been doing a good job of building the stack, and more importantly, the ecosystem needed for an open source cloud computing platform."

RightScale, a Rackspace cloud tools partner was drawn to the company because of its work with OpenStack. RightScale is a cloud management platform that allows users to design, deploy, manage and automate business-critical applications on the cloud.

"We were drawn to Rackspace for their reputation in cloud computing and also because of their leadership in the OpenStack project," said Michael Crandell, RightScale CEO. "RightScale is committed to supporting the major cloud infrastructures to help make cloud computing easier, save time and reduce risk. The OpenStack project continues to have major impact on the cloud market, and because of that we are excited to be working so closely with Rackspace and OpenStack."

Currently, Rackspace’s Cloud Files product runs OpenStack Object Storage, and there are plans to expand OpenStack into other offerings, as the OpenStack cloud matures. In addition to Rackspace’s OpenStack development, the company has also served as the leader in driving the adoption of OpenStack by hosting the first public Design Summit for the project. Serving as a crucial platform for OpenStack release planning, development and innovation, the first public Design Summit in October attracted more than 250 people from 90 companies and 14 countries to San Antonio, TX, to plan for the second and third code releases.

"From day-one Rackspace has believed industry standards emerge from widely adopted, open platforms," said Lew Moorman, president, cloud and chief strategy officer, Rackspace Hosting. "Over the past six months we have seen the OpenStack community grow, showing we are not alone in this fight. As one of the founding members we couldn't be more excited about OpenStack’s success. We plan to continue to deploy OpenStack widely here at Rackspace to offer the best, most compatible and flexible offerings to our customers."

OpenStack is a collection of open source technologies delivering a massively scalable cloud operating system. OpenStack is currently developing two interrelated projects: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage. OpenStack Compute is software to provision and manage large groups of virtual private servers, and OpenStack Object Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. The first 'Austin' code release was October 2010, and second 'Bexar' release is expected to be available for download February 3, 2011.

About Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace Hosting is the world's leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, and the founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. In 2010, Rackspace was recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and listed on the InformationWeek 500 as one of the nation’s most innovative users of business technology. The company was also positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the “2010 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting.” For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize 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 market acceptance associated with the acquired products and services of Cloudkick ; anticipated operational and financial benefits from the acquired products and services of Cloudkick, including the implementation and use of such products or services into Rackspace product and service offerings; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include including the possibility that expected benefits from Cloud Servers for Windows may not materialize because this product is not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the acquired products and services cost effectively, differentiate the products and services from competitive products and services or communicate the differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the acquired products and services, (iii) our inability to develop the acquired technology into our products or services effectively, (iv) changes in technology which adversely affect the product’s benefit, (v) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (vi) internal strategy decisions that impact the product, and (vii) other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2010, filed with the SEC on November 9, 2010. 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.

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For more information, please contact:

Rackspace Hosting
Melissa Smolensky
512-423-3382
melissa.smolensky@rackspace.com