Managed hosting and cloud services provider Rackspace added about 2,000 servers in its data centers during the fourth quarter of 2010. It also added about 10,000 new customers.

On the same day as he reported a successful close of 2010, the company's CFO Bruce Knooihuizen, 55, announced that he plans to retire. He will stay with the company until it finds a replacement and will see Rackspace through the transition to a new CFO.

Rackspace said Knooihuizen, who has been its CFO since 2008, built a strong finance team and helped put the firm on solid financial footing. He helped Rackspace go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

As its computing capacity and customer base grew during the fourth quarter, so did revenue. The company reported about US$13.5m in net income on $214.7m in sales for the year's final three months. Revenue was up 27% and net income grew by about 50% from the fourth quarter of 2009.

Knooihuizen said the results indicated success in achieving goals the company had set for 2010: to speed up growth rate from 2009 while retaining margins and investing in the business.

"We also said that we expected adjusted free cash flow to be positive at growth rates below 35%," Knooihuizen said. "With the year completed, I am very pleased to report that we delivered on all three objectives."

For the full year, Rackspace reported net income of about $46.3m on about $780.5m in sales.

The company stepped up its activity in the cloud computing market during the quarter, adding both new infrastructure to support its cloud offerings and new cloud-based products.

Rackspace launched infrastructure in the UK to support European-based cloud customers. New UK cloud services include Rackspace Cloud Files and Cloud Servers.

Its new cloud services include Managed Cloud ÔÇô cloud servers with a managed service level ÔÇô as well as two new services for enterprise customers: RackConnect and Critical sites.

RackConnect is a solution for seamless integration of cloud and dedicated hosting and Critical Sites is a service that provides advanced monitoring for customers whose web applications are considered mission-critical.

Total server count in Rackspace data centers reached about 66,000 during the fourth quarter, up from about 64,000 in Q3. Its customer base grew from about 119,000 in the third quarter to about 130,000 in the fourth.