“The recent additions to our portfolio, including Cloud Connect and Critical Sites, make logical business sense for those looking for best-in-class hosted solutions as alternatives to expensive and inefficient on-premise IT infrastructure,” said Rackspace CTO John Engates (pictured) as his company Rackspace Hosting announced that it was boosting its Enterprise-grade services with the addition of two new offerings: Cloud Connect and Critical Sites.

"Businesses of all sizes and budgets," Engates added, "now have access to Enterprise-class infrastructure, backed by our industry-leading Fanatical Support.

San Antonio, Texas based Rackspace Hosting describes itself as the world's leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing and is best known in the industry for coining (and registering) the concept of Fanatical Support.

Critical Sites, for example, is an extension of Fanatical Support into the application layer. The offering is designed, says Rackspace, to deliver mission-critical support for clients’ most important websites and applications.

The company describes it as follows:

"Critical Sites is specifically designed for clients who are dependent upon an online presence to drive customer acquisition/retention, revenue generation, customer service, and the building of brand equity. This new service level offers the technical expertise and enterprise tools to help maximize infrastructure performance, proactively identify issues before they affect the end user experience and quickly address any problems that do occur.

Every Critical Sites customer receives access to a suite of Advanced Performance Management tools to gain real-time visibility of the end user experience. The tools are designed to increase peak application performance and availability, and ensure that the infrastructure functions at the optimal level to support the business. In recognition of the importance of mission-critical websites and applications to its customers, Critical Sites is backed by an advanced SLA with available double payout on select SLA terms."

Rackspace's claim for Cloud Connect, which was released from beta at the beginning of November, is that it's the first service to seamlessly link together cloud computing and traditional hosting, along with providing enhanced user control and security. The aim is to allow Rackspace customers to combine the scalability and cost benefits of The Rackspace Cloud with the added security and configurability of dedicated managed hosting.

Engates explains:

"As an extension of Rackspace’s Fanatical Support, Cloud Connect customers will interact with a single account team and will not be charged for bandwidth within the Cloud Connect infrastructure."

Engates notes that Rackspace customer Major League Gaming (MLG), which operates one of the largest online professional video game leagues in the world supporting million of players worldwide, has already taken advantage of Cloud Connect to meet its technology needs. (MLG is the dominant media property exclusively targeting the approximately 40 million consumers in North America who have a passion for playing video games as a competitive social activity.)

“As a growing company with millions of users, we have significant scaling requirements that are being addressed very successfully with Rackspace’s Hybrid Hosting approach,” stated Brian Corrigan, CTO, Major League Gaming.

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