Hosting firm Rackspace is now offering dedicated virtual servers to European customers to help them cope with rapid growth demands or fluctuations in capacity.

Based on VMware Infrastructure 3, Rackspace's new product gives each customer their own hardware, enabling them to mix and match virtual and physical hosted environments.

As part of the package, Rackspace enables customers to expand their capacity at any time by rapidly provisioning pre-defined virtual machines based on Windows Server 2003 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Redundancy is also provided, with the ability to automatically recover to a second physical host in the event of failure.

The cost of the virtual hosted service will vary depending on the hardware chosen and the exact options customers require, Rackspace said.

"We work closely with our customers on the type of products they need to help their business work more efficiently," said Brian Thomson, managing director for EMEA at Rackspace.

He added that Rackspace provides protection against unanticipated traffic spikes enabling customers to gain all the benefits of virtualisation while reducing the associated risks.