Rackspace Managed Hosting raises bar for hosting support through new service level agreement

Managed Hosting, the leading managed hosting provider, today announced a new service level agreement (SLA) as part of the company`s strategy to consistently roll-out innovative new services to customers. The new SLA offers a 100% network and infrastructure availability guarantee, along with a one-hour hardware replacement guarantee. With this announcement,

sets a new standard for SLAs in the hosting industry.

"It is becoming exceedingly more difficult for Web hosting providers to create a service that differentiates themselves from their competitors," said Ted Chamberlin, networking analyst at Gartner. "Creating a meaningful SLA that supports a highly available environment and then actually delivering on it is the goal. The SLA will provide differentiation in the market today."

"While it is more challenging to maintain uptime given current security threats, Rackspace is increasing its customer commitment and is confident it can deliver a 100% availability guarantee," said David Bryce, vice-president of customer care, Rackspace Managed Hosting. "Fanatical Support is about constantly improving our service and delivering on customers` needs. It is the industry standard, yet we remain committed to improving the customer experience with new features, services and guarantees."

Backing its strict SLA with generous customer refunds in the event of downtime or failure, Rackspace ensures that customers will avoid disruption to their business. The new SLA guarantees that Rackspace`s multi-homed network, powered by five leading bandwidth providers, will be available 100% of the time. Leveraging a redundant Cisco-powered network, Rackspace has delivered 100% network availability for more than 30 consecutive months, with only three maintenance windows in the last year.

All critical infrastructure systems, including power and HVAC, in Rackspace`s four, geographically-distributed, state-of-the-art data centres will also be available 100% of the time. Additionally, Rackspace assures the functioning of all hardware components through its aggressive SLA. While many service providers promise to provide an initial response to customer problems within a few hours, Rackspace guarantees any hardware issues to be resolved within one hour.