Rackspace Inc. posted its third quarter earnings after the whistle on Monday, blowing past analysts’ expectations with $509 million in revenues, a 10.7 percent increase from one year ago. The company’s net income was $37 million, or $0.26 per share.

Wall Street’s experts were expecting revenues of $503.08 million and earnings of just $0.20 per share.

For the fourth quarter, Wall Street analysts said they’re hoping for non-GAAP earnings of $0.23 per share and revenues of $517.57 million. In response, Rackspace said it expects revenue to grow between 2.0 percent and 3.0 percent quarter-over-quarter, on a constant currency basis, and expects Adjusted EBITDA margins to be between 33 percent and 34 percent.

Rackspace’s share price jumped by $0.71 cents, or 3 percent, to $27.80 in after hours trading yesterday.

So why is Rackspace suddenly doing so well, after years of stagnant growth that at one point even pushed the company to try and sell itself?

Taylor Rhodes, CEO of Rackspace, cited long-term growth drivers stemming from company’s new partnerships with major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Most recently, Rackspace rolled out a new “Fanatical Support” service for AWS cloud customers, which includes operational support and round-the-clock app management. Around the same time, Rackspace introduced a “Managed Cloud” service for users of Adobe’s Experience Manager content management platform.

Rackspace has also been busy on the product front, most recently launching Carina, a “container-as-a-service” beta offering that essentially provides a hosted environment for running Docker containers.

It’s not clear how much each of these new products and service offerings are contributing to Rackspace’s bottom line, but the company is definitely doing something right. Indeed, things are going so well that it announced it’s intending to issue $350 million in senior debt to “repay all outstanding amounts under its senior revolving credit facility.”

In another positive sign, Rackspace said it purchased $250 million of its own equity during the last quarter. On the downside, the company revealed its cash supply has dwindled by $25 million to just $189 million. Additionally, its debt load has risen from $47.2 million one year ago to a much more ominous-looking $140 million.

All in all it was a great quarter for Rackspace, which is seeing growth that’s way ahead of most people’s expectations. The challenge now, as always, is to try and keep it up.

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