Rackspace Technology

1990s

Rackspace was founded in 1996 by Richard Yoo, Dirk Elmendorf and Patrick Condon. Two years later, Graham Weston and Morris Miller provided seed capital and began managing the company. The company began after Yoo dropped out of Trinity University and launched Cymitar Technology Group out of a garage, through which the company sold internet access to his former classmates. In 1998, the company was renamed Rackspace. That year, Weston became CEO.

2000s

Lanham Napier entered the company in 2000 as its chief financial officer. In 2006, Yoo left Rackspace and Napier was named chief executive officer (CEO). Weston stepped down as CEO and that year, he was named chairman.

In 2008, Rackspace moved its headquarters to the then-unoccupied Windsor Park Mall in Windcrest, Texas. Rackspace's Chairman, Graham Weston, owned the Montgomery Ward building in the mall until 2006 when it was sold to a developer In 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Rackspace employees volunteered to refurbish the Montgomery Ward into a shelter for 1,300 people.

The revitalization of the mall lead to development in the surrounding area, including the creation of Racker Road and the frontage road Fanatical Way, inspired by the company's trademark "Fanatical Support". "Fanatical support" was the company's motto to describe its customer service. This consisted of the disuse of voicemail, live customer support, and London-based customer service representatives always accessible, which at the time news reports attribute to giving Rackspace an "edge" in the web hosting industry. Later, Rackspace's Fanatical Support would be used to describe a service of providing customer representatives when businesses were implementing cloud hosting.

In 2008 Rackspace opened for trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "RAX" after its initial public offering (IPO) in which it raised $187.5 million. The initial public offering included 15,000,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $12.50 per share. The IPO did not do well in the public market and lost about 20% of its initial price almost immediately.

At around 3:45 PM CST December 18, 2009, Rackspace experienced an outage for customers using its Dallas–Fort Worth data center – including those of Rackspace Cloud.

2010s

In 2010, Rackspace announced it would discontinue hosting the website for Dove World Outreach Center after pastor Terry Jones said he planned to burn the Qur'an on the anniversary of 9/11. Jones called the move an "indirect attack on our freedom of speech." Business Insider also criticized Rackspace's decision.

In 2014, Napier stepped down as CEO and Weston was named the interim CEO. Taylor Rhodes was named president and later that year replaced Weston as CEO.

Rackspace launched ServerBeach in San Antonio in January 2003 as a lower-cost alternative for dedicated servers designed for technology hobbyists who want flexibility and reliability. Richard Yoo was a catalyst in the startup of ServerBeach. It was sold to Peer 1 Hosting, now Cogeco Peer 1, in October 2004. Peer 1 Hosting entered the UK managed hosting market in January 2009 and the ServerBeach brand now competes directly with the UK arm of Rackspace, run by Dominic Monkhouse, former managing director of Rackspace Limited.

In October 2006, Mosso Inc. was launched, which experimented with white-labeling hosting services. Eventually, the division became the foundation for the Rackspace Cloud Computing offering.

The Webmail.us business was branded as Mailtrust and in May 2009 became part of a newly formed Cloud Office division.

On October 1, 2007, Rackspace acquired Webmail.us, a private e-mail hosting firm located in Blacksburg, VA. Originally branded as Mailtrust on May 20, 2009, it became part of the newly formed Cloud Office division of Rackspace.

Rackspace's first acquisition was Webmail.us, an email hosting firm in Blacksburg, Virginia, bought in September 2007 and rebranded as Mailtrust. In October 2008 the company announced two purchases on the same day: Slicehost, a St. Louis provider of virtual private servers, and Jungle Disk, an online backup service. The pair were bought for a reported $11.5 million in cash and stock, with up to $16.5 million more contingent on performance, and were presented as a move to compete with Amazon Web Services.

Smaller purchases followed as Rackspace built out its cloud platform and its work on OpenStack. These included the server-monitoring company Cloudkick, the OpenStack development firm Anso Labs, the transactional email service Mailgun, the managed MongoDB provider ObjectRocket, Exceptional Cloud Services and ZeroVM. In February 2012 it also bought SharePoint911, a Microsoft SharePoint consultancy based in Cincinnati.

and in September 2017 it announced the purchase of Datapipe, a Jersey City managed hosting company.

Later acquisitions were consultancies working on platforms other than Rackspace's own infrastructure: the Salesforce consultancy RelationEdge in September 2018, the AWS specialist Onica in November 2019, and Just Analytics, a Singapore-based cloud data, analytics and artificial intelligence firm, in January 2022.