According to the announcement Wednesday, Visa USA (usa.visa.com) accepted Rackspace's Payment Card Industry Report on Compliance, adding another layer of sophistication to the company's current PCI Compliance toolbox, and Visa's top standard of certification.

Rackspace is the largest Level 1 certified hosting provider according to the company according to the San Antonio, Texas-based company.

"PCI DSS is not law, but it is strictly enforced by banks through contractual penalties or sanctions," Rackspace Hosting chief security officer Jeff Reich said in a statement. We want to make it easy and affordable for our many e-commerce customers to reach compliance with the help of this bundled security solution."

Launched in July, the Rackspace security suite offers virus protection, customer network scanning services, file system integrity services, firewall services, intrusion detection, log management, patch management, physical system security, SSL certificates, VPN system management.

Earlier this month, Hosting provider Rackspace (rackspace.com) went public with its initial public offering of 15,000,000 common stock shares priced at $12.50 per share on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "RAX," becoming the third IT company in 2008 to launch an IPO. A difficult year for IPOs across all industries according to business news service Reuters, Rackspace opened at a disappointing $10.41 on Thursday.