Rackspace Hosting Ranks 92 on FORTUNE List of “100 Best Companies to Work For”

SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Rackspace® Hosting, (NYSE: RAX), the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, today announced it has been ranked 92 on FORTUNE magazine’s annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” FORTUNE has now named Rackspace as one of America’s top workplaces in three of the past four years. The full list and related stories appear in the February 7 issue of FORTUNE, and today at fortune.com/bestcompanies.
  
“We are honored to be included among the great companies on the FORTUNE list, and view it as affirmation of the culture that our Rackers have been building,” said Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace. “What has made us the leader in our industry is our exceptional customer service, which we call Fanatical Support. That level of service can’t be commanded. It can only be volunteered. So I want to thank every Racker for building a workplace where they can volunteer their best each day, for customers and for one another.”

At Rackspace, as featured on the full list, employees, called Rackers, help companies fix technology problems by providing Fanatical Support®. In addition to the overall ranking, Rackspace was placed in the top fourteen for benefits, which includes paying 100 percent of healthcare premiums for Rackers, 32 on the small company list and 76 on the Big Pay List for industry leading system administrator pay.

Rackspace’s culture of service and focus on employee engagement gives the company a unique business advantage. It helps to attract customers, please them with Fanatical Support, and turn them into an army of promoters. By the same token, engaged Rackers recommend the company as a place to work. Approximately 50 percent of new hires at Rackspace come through referrals from current employees. Additionally, it is very difficult to get hired at Rackspace, which hires about 1 percent of its applicants. To help put that in perspective, Harvard University accepted approximately 7 percent of the students that applied for admission in 2009.

Underpinning Rackspace’s culture is a complex business process that has been refined over the past decade. That process involves everything from the way Rackspace recruits and extensively interviews prospective employees, to the way it tests for and develops employees’ strengths, to the way it measures employee and customer engagement, to the way it celebrates and rewards success.

Rackspace continued to expand its global workforce in 2010 to well over 3000 employees, and currently has more than 300 positions open globally in departments ranging from software development to tech support and sales, at http://www.rackertalent.com/.

FORTUNE Survey Methodology

To pick the 100 Best Companies to Work For, FORTUNE partners with the Great Place to Work Institute to conduct the most extensive employee survey in corporate America. Three hundred eleven companies participated in this year's survey. Two-thirds of a company's score is based on the results of the Institute's Trust Index survey, which is sent to a random sample of employees from each company. The survey asks questions related to the employee’s attitudes about management's credibility, job satisfaction, and camaraderie. The other third of the scoring is based on the company's responses to the Institute's Culture Audit, which includes detailed questions about pay and benefit programs and a series of open-ended questions about hiring practices, internal communications, training, recognition programs and diversity efforts. Any company that is at least seven years old with more than 1,000 U.S. employees is eligible. The deadline for applying for next year's list is June 15, 2011. For an online nomination form, go to www.greatplacetowork.com.1

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.

By admin with No comments