Rackspace said that in contrast to other service providers, which deny customers administrative-level access to their applications, it gives them full administrative control while still undertaking monitoring responsibilities and guaranteeing performance.

"Intensive's SLA really offers the best of both worlds in terms of extending application control to our customers, while we take accountability for everything else. Intensive constantly monitors the software stack to maintain a stable groundwork for application performance," says John Engates, chief technology officer of Rackspace Managed Hosting. "Intensive's application SLA takes our promise of Fanatical Support one step further with proactive service level management and delivers generous customer refunds in the event of failure."

Intensive uses an integrated set of proprietary and industry standard monitoring tools to observe each layer of the hardware and software infrastructure that supports the customer application. Application integrity tests are performed every five minutes and reports are generated at the end of the month.

SLA credits will be issued to customers if it fails to comply with the stipulations of the SLA, Rackspace said.