Web hosting and cloud services company Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) is acquiring San Francisco based Anso Labs. Anso Labs provides cloud computing consulting and services to clients. Anso Labs is led by Jesse Andrews, the former lead architect at Flock. And Flock was recently acquired by Zynga.

Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) has acquired a Y Combinator backed server management system company called Cloudkick. The acquisition details are unknown. Cloudkick started in 2009 and they provide graphs that show the health of servers. There are also tools that show what each server is doing. Cloudkick has about 1,500 clients, many of them in the Fortune 500. [TechCrunch]

Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) took down the website owned by Pastor Terry Jones. Pastor Jones threatened to hold a protest and burn the Quran on September 11th. Rackspace said that the website violated the hosting company’s policy against “hateful speech.” Rackspace spokesperson Dan Goodgame said Rackspace was not acting as a censor, but took down the website strictly out of company policy.

Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) is catching up with Amazon.com when it comes to cloud computing. About a year ago Rackspace Hosting CEO Lanham Napier said that Amazon.com was far ahead of them. But now Napier admits that they are closing the gap against Amazon.com.

Rackspace cloud computing hosting grew over 100% in a year and now the business is contributing to 10% of the overall company revenue for the past third quarter. The Rackspace Cloud originally launched as Mosso LLC in March 2006.

Disclosure: Mosso/Rackspace is the hosting company of Pulse2.com.

Rackspace Hosting Inc. (NYSE:RAX) is expecting to return customer credit from the major outage that they had this past Monday.  The dollar amount that the company is expecting to return will be between $2.5 and $3.5 million according to an SEC filing.  The cause of the outage was a series of equipment failures at a Rackspace data center in Dallas, Texas.

Several generators malfunctioned which put several servers out of power without backup.  “We sincerely apologize for this disruption and know that it impacted our customers’ businesses as well as the experience of many who use the web,” stated Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier in a blog post. “Although we have had some issues with this data center before, please know that we will do what it takes to improve its reliability and performance. We owe you an action plan to prevent this type of thing in the future, and we’ll get that to you as soon as it is ready.”  The data center in Dallas, Texas is 144,000 in square feet and is Rackspace’s largest facility.

Personal note: Pulse2.com uses Mosso, a Rackspace subsidiary and we have been 100% satisfied with their services.  Pulse2.com barely had any downtime and if there was, we were refunded immediately.

Rackspace is a web hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas.  Rackspace is getting ready to have an initial public offer on the NYSE with stock ticket symbol, RAX.  Rackspace is opening with 15 million shares at $12.50 per share.  Through the IPO, Rackspace will raise about $187.5 million.  Goldman-Sachs, Credit Suisse, and Merrill Lynch are book running the IPO.

Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital own 27.8% of Rackspace combined.  Norwest owns 11.6% and Sequoia owns 16.2%.  Rackspace wanted to raise $276 million through the IPO, but had to target for a lower price because of the economic conditions.

Rackspace was co-founded by Pat Condon, Dirk Elmendorf, and (Update: see comment #1) Richard Yoo.  Some of Rackspace’s partners include Microsoft, Redhat, Dell, Cisco, HP, AMD, VMware, and PCI.

Related Links:
1. Rackspace.com
2. GigaOM