By Chris BurtHosting provider Codero Hosting announced Wednesday it has named Robert Autenrieth COO and VP, technical operations and supportHosting provider Codero Hosting announced Wednesday it has named Robert Autenrieth COO and VP, technical operations and support.Autenrieth is the fifth former senior executive of Rackspace to join Codero in the past year. At Rackspace Autenrieth most recently was VP of global support operations.In his new position Autenrieth is responsible for management of Codero’s customer support, data center operations, and technical operations teams. He will also be in charge of all aspects of data center strategy.In eight years with Rackspace, Autenrieth had various roles, including general manager of data center engineering/operations, and was involved with developing and implementing strategies for data center management, customer care, engineering, and asset management.“With his extensive hosting technology experience, Robert is uniquely qualified to deliver on Codero’s promise of exceptional service through industry-leading uptime, expert customer support, and unparalleled value and performance,” said Emil Sayegh, CEO and president of Codero Hosting. “Robert led one of the largest teams at Rackspace with hundreds of employees reporting to him, making him an ideal fit to ensure Codero reliably delivers cloud-based services on a massive scale, always advancing our technology to meet growing customer and business demands.”Codero has recently been expanding aggressively in several areas. In April, Codero moved a number of hosting services to Dell PowerEdge servers to meet enterprise hosting customers demand, and alsolaunched on-demand storage services. The web host capped a flurry of appointments and data center openings with the opening of its Austin offices in late 2012.“This is a very exciting time at Codero and I am honored to be part of the team,” said Autenrieth. “As companies shift from internally-run data centers to managed and cloud hosting providers, Codero is perfectly aligning automation, operations, marketing and the right product mix to support the SMB and enterprise markets.”Codero’s promotional materials take direct aim at Rackspace and AWS, claiming faster cloud performance and cheaper dedicated hosting as it attempts to continue to grow its market share. Codero is still hiring for a number of positions.