San Antonio Food Bank Relies on Rackspace to Help Fight Hunger in Southwest Texas

SAN ANTONIO – May 29, 2007 – Rackspace® Managed Hosting, a leading global provider of managed hosting services, today announced an agreement with the San Antonio Food Bank. Ranked eighth in the nation among America’s Second Harvest Food Banks based on pounds distributed, the San Antonio Food Bank tapped Rackspace to host its website and critical online applications in support of its mission to fight hunger in Southwest Texas through food distribution, programs, education and advocacy.

Previously, the San Antonio Food Bank hosted its website and applications with another hosting provider, but a debilitating sequence of outages forced them to look elsewhere. The most recent outage occurred when the Food Bank moved its main offices to a new location. The Food Bank’s email and website went offline for days and no resolution to the problem was attained.

With its website down, the Food Bank was faced with significant challenges in its agencies’ inability to access the website to place food orders for the communities in need. The Food Bank resorted to accepting orders manually via fax and phone, ultimately taking time away from its ability to box and ship food. The Food Bank’s website is used as a communication and logistics tool to educate volunteers and donors, and to provide information on upcoming events and volunteer opportunities.

“Our website is a critical tool and the primary source of communication with our 375 agencies to let them know what donations are in the food bank and what is available for distribution. If it is not accessible, these agencies cannot place their orders and food gets delayed, or worse – not delivered at all – to thousands of hungry people,” said Eric Cooper, executive director, San Antonio Food Bank. “The decision to move to Rackspace was easy because the most important thing we need is uptime. Rackspace’s 100 percent uptime guarantee combined with their employees' passion for providing Fanatical Support™ gives us an underlying sense of security and stability we did not have with our previous hosting provider.”

“By taking advantage of Rackspace’s vast infrastructure and technical expertise, the San Antonio Food Bank will bring increased reliability to its communities,” said Frederick Mendler, vice president of Fanatical Support, Rackspace Managed Hosting. “Rackspace’s Fanatical Support promise applies to all of our customers. Our team will diligently work alongside the Food Bank’s IT department to help them increase its website reliability to help fight hunger in Southwest Texas.”

The San Antonio Food Bank, a non-profit organization, is responsible for procuring and delivering food and grocery products through a network of 375 different non-profit charity agencies, throughout 16 counties in the greater San Antonio area. Last year alone, the San Antonio Food Bank distributed $50 million worth of food and grocery products, an estimated 34 million pounds, averaging out to 1.8 million meals a month going to 40,000 poor and hungry families in the San Antonio area.

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