Rackspace has finally decided to give its customers a helping hand, with the launch of a “managed” service for those who want to benefit from its cloudy expertise.

According to Rackspace’s blog post on the announcement, it’s “targeting businesses and developers who want to tap the power of the cloud without the pain of running everything themselves — and the expense of recruiting or contracting with experts in dozens of complex technologies.”

Rackspace is clearly targeting those organizations that don’t possess the right expertise and architecture to manage their own clouds, yet still want the benefits of having one. As such, these customers will benefit from 24/7 support from real people who’ll oversee and manager their clouds. This means that Rackspace’s experts will be granted full access to customer’s servers to do whatever it takes to keep them up and running.

The company’s offering two options of its managed service. The primary option is its “managed operations” service, which costs $US0.02 per GB per hour for support with a minimum $500 per month charge. For this, customers will get support for the installation of operating systems and servers, their maintenance, DNS support and account maintainance.

For those looking for a cheaper option, Rackspace’s budget-friendly “managed infrastructure” service can be had for just $0.005 per GB per hour of support, for a minimum fee of $50 per month. This package provides support and guidance, but the dirty work is left to the customer. More details of the services are available here.

Rackspace used the occasion to announce a few more new services, including something called “assisted cloudbursting” that gives customers a temporary increase in cloud capacity to cope with increased workloads. It also touted its new “Developer+” service that assists coders in getting their apps up and running in Rackspace’s cloud.

In its blog, Rackspace makes much of the fact that neither AWS or Google offers managed services. But that’s not entirely true, because the two cloud giants are quite happy to let their partners do the dirty work for customers, and Microsoft’s Azure has much the same attitude. Which means that Rackspace’s manager servers really aren’t a novel idea at all, the only difference is that the company will get the job done by itself.

Image credit: tpsdave via Pixabay.com