Rackspace offers reassurance with managed cloud servers

Rackspace is adding a managed support option to its UK cloud services, offloading the need for customers to monitor or troubleshoot their virtual servers and freeing them to focus on their core business.

Available from Thursday, Cloud Servers with a Managed Service Level provides customers with 24 x 7 managed services and service level agreements (SLAs) covering virtual machine instances running in Rackspace's UK infrastructure.

"We're taking the managed service that we've been providing for more than a decade and layering that on top of our standard Cloud Servers," said Simon Abrahams, Rackspace head of product marketing.

The service is aimed at customers that need more support, and is already offered in the US, where it has largely displaced Rackspace's entry-level managed physical server, according to Abrahams.

"I think this will be particularly attractive to customers who previously bought a single server, but also smaller web hosting companies building sites for several customers of their own, because they are getting monitoring, patching and backup included," he said.

With Rackspace's managed services, monitoring alerts are sent to customers and the Rackspace support team, but customers can elect to let a technician troubleshoot the problem before they know about it.

To take advantage, customers pay a £65 per month fee, plus 10p per hour for each managed Cloud Server instance, in addition to the subscription fee for the server itself.

Charges for the Cloud Servers start at just 1p per hour for an entry-level Linux instance, rising to £1.38 per hour for a Windows Server instance with SQL Server installed.