Rackspace Office 365 Exchange Essentials, $ (on request)

Office 365 Exchange Essentials has been discontinued on December 13, 2025 (added September 1, 2018), Aggregate Rating (3.3 out of 10 from 16 reviews)

🔌 Hosted domains :	unlimited
🆓 free domains :	0
📌 Dedicated IPs :	0
💳 Payment Methods :	Credit / Debit / Prepaid Cards
🔧 Category :	Fully Managed
✍️ Support Options :	EmailHelp DeskPhone / Toll-FreeLive ChatAvailable 24/7
🌏 Server Locations :	United States
⚑ Targeting :	AU AT CA CL FI HK IN IE IL LV MX NO PE SG AE US

Original plan URL was https://www.rackspace.com/applications/microsoft-365

📜 Plan description

📄 Editorial Review

Rackspace Technology is a long-established hosting and cloud services provider that started operations in 1998 in San Antonio, Texas, when three Trinity University classmates launched a managed hosting business that focused on doing more than just renting servers. Over time, the company evolved from traditional hosting into a broader multicloud and hybrid-cloud services specialist, rebranding as Rackspace Technology and positioning itself as an end-to-end partner for cloud, data, security and applications. They serve customers in more than 120 countries, including a significant portion of large enterprises, and are known for their "Fanatical Experience" approach to service.

From a classic hosting perspective, Rackspace still maintains a strong portfolio around managed hosting on dedicated infrastructure and colocation hosting. Managed Hosting is delivered on single-tenant bare-metal servers that are fully designed, deployed and operated by Rackspace engineers. Customers can choose custom dedicated servers, database management for MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, enterprise storage (SAN and NAS), managed backup, disaster recovery, networking and security components such as next-generation firewalls and DDoS mitigation. This gives them a clear positioning in the Dedicated Hosting and Managed Hosting space for mission-critical workloads where performance, compliance and SLAs matter more than low entry pricing.

Alongside dedicated infrastructure, Rackspace provides Colocation Hosting for organizations that want to keep ownership and control of their hardware while offloading data-center operations. Customers place their own servers and storage in Rackspace facilities, gaining access to enterprise power, cooling, connectivity and on-site "Smart Hands" support. Colocation is offered in dozens of data centers worldwide, with an emphasis on extending or exiting in-house data centers while retaining direct control over compute and security.

Rackspace is also deeply involved in cloud and private cloud. They are co-creators of OpenStack and still operate OpenStack Private Cloud Enterprise, offering fully managed OpenStack environments with a 99.99% API uptime commitment, dedicated compute nodes, redundant controller nodes, and scalable Ceph-based storage. Customers can run these private clouds in Rackspace data centers, their own facilities or third-party colocation sites. Beyond OpenStack, Rackspace manages environments on major public clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and VMware-based private clouds, positioning itself as a multicloud managed services provider rather than a simple Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendor.

On top of infrastructure, Rackspace has a significant Email & Productivity line. Rackspace Email and Rackspace Email Plus provide business-class email with 25 GB mailboxes, anti-spam and virus protection, optional file storage and collaboration tools, and a dedicated webmail interface. These services are backed by explicit 100% uptime guarantees and 24x7x365 human support. Rackspace also runs and supports Microsoft 365, Hosted Exchange and related collaboration solutions, so email and productivity clearly remain an important part of their portfolio under the Emails and Managed Hosting categories.

The overall impression is of a provider that has deliberately moved away from commodity shared hosting and unmanaged VPS, and now focuses on larger organizations that need tailored Dedicated, Colocation, Private Cloud and Managed Public Cloud solutions, with strong SLAs and operational support as the main differentiator. However, by November 2025, a comparison with 2021 using WHTop’s historical prices, screenshots, and content suggests that Rackspace has shown little visible progress, which may indicate stagnation and even a gradual decline.