Rackspace Now Has 70,000 Servers

Rackspace Hosting added more than 4,400 servers in the first quarter of 2011 to support its managed hosting and cloud computing operations, giving the company a total of 70,473 servers in its data centers. The milestone makes Rackspace only the sixth company to publicly report a server count higher than 70,000.

Who are the others? Check out the updated rundown of Who Has The Most Web Servers.

The server count was one of many metrics in which Rackspace reported growth. The company also had a net gain of more than 12,000 customers,and now has 142,441. Cloud computing revenue increased to $37.1 million, up from $34.4 million in the previous quarter, while the company’s managed hosting operated grew from $183.3 million to $192.9 million for the quarter.

Rackspace also reported that annualized net revenue per average technical square foot of space topped $5,083, up from $4,807 last quarter and $4.298 in he year-earlier period.

Rackspace earned 10 cents a share, up from 7 cents a share in the prior year’s quarter. Analysts, however, had forecast earnings of 11 cents a share. Shares of RAX were about 2 percent lower in after-hours trading Monday evening.