italki and Rackspace speak the same language

Hong Kong – September 28, 2016 – Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, today announced that pioneering educational technology website italki is using Rackspace managed cloud services as the company seeks to disrupt language learning and expand globally.

italki is the world’s leading online marketplace for language teachers and connects 1.5 million students and 3,000 teachers around the world. People wishing to learn a language can search the site for a teacher; after their lesson, which mainly takes place via Skype, students rate teachers and this feedback builds the teachers’ reputations on the site.

Italki began as a small start-up in Shanghai, China and because of budgetary constraints, they needed the most affordable hosting partner that they could find. However, as the company’s customer base went global, italki realized they needed a partner with similar global reach to help them achieve their vision of becoming the world’s biggest language learning platform. That is when they reached out to Rackspace.

Today, almost all of italki’s infrastructure is based on Rackspace. italki has dedicated servers for their databases, cloud servers for application layers and cloud files for big data. The Rackspace managed cloud platform allows italki to scale very easily and quickly to support their growing customer base. With Rackspace, italki gets the experience, the support and the knowledge that they might not necessarily have as a small company. Rackspace’s managed cloud also means that italki can concentrate on improving their products and delivering a consistent experience for their global audience, while Rackspace manages their infrastructure.

Included with all of Rackspace’s hosting solutions is Fanatical Support®. Rackspace’s results-obsessed, can-do approach to customer service means that its support team, engineers and architects and their specialized expertise are always available, and italki can rely on Rackspace to not only address problems as they happen, but also to identify potential issues that have not yet occurred. Offering 24x7x365 support and industry-leading service level agreements that guarantee exceptional reliability and uptime, it had huge appeal for italki.

“Fanatical Support is not just about helping us solve immediate problems – they are always looking towards the future, helping us to look at problems or solve problems we might not have even seen yet. We rely on Rackspace’s experience to really help us focus on developing new products, as we don’t have to worry about managing our infrastructure or dealing with the big problems,” said Joe Lambert, italki’s Technical Director.

“We are very pleased to be working with italki as they disrupt and democratise language learning by taking it online.  We provide seamless assistance to solve complications in the back end, allowing them to put all their efforts into providing their customers with an excellent, innovative service,” said Adam McCarthy, Rackspace’s Senior Director and General Manager, Asia.