Rackspace Hosting has launched an unlimited Cloud Block Storage service which it claims will offer more consistent and reliable performance without vendor lock in.

The service provides two options: a standard drive service for everyday storage and a high performance Solid State Drive (SSD) service. Both will have a transparent, flat pricing structure with no charge for Input/Output.

The beauty of the scheme is its simple pricing model - starting from 15 cents (US) per gigabyte per month - and the freedom if offers clients, said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. “We developed Cloud Block Storage to deliver consistent performance, infinite scalability and a simple model that gives customers more flexibility,” said Engates.

The Standard option includes full featured attachable storage, with up to one Terabyte of additional storage to cloud Servers, attachments made between compute nodes in seconds and the choice of standard performance or SSD-based media. The Enhanced service comes with SSD running up to 980 per cent faster than standard drives, offers high performance without needing RAID and there is no cap on input output operations.

Pricing starts at $0.15 per gigabyte per month (standard) through to $0.65 per gigabyte per month for SSD. There's also no additional per-instance fee nor minimum instance size.