A screenshot of the pricing tool taken from the ElasticHosts website.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — With the launch of its services in mid-August, cloud hosting provider ElasticHosts (www.elastichosts.com) staked an early claim in what may one day become a competitive European cloud computing landscape.
While the market for cloud hosting services in the US is fairly developed – in the claims-staked and hotly contested sense – the European market is less so, with few of the big US players operating local presences.
ElasticHosts CEO and founder Richard Davies says the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering should appeal to European customers with concerns about latency and EU data legislation.
“If you’re a European company looking for cloud hosting,” he says, “and you’re looking for it from a European location for legal jurisdiction and fast networking – high bandwidth, low latency – your options are much more limited than if you were in the US.”
Amazon’s EC2 service has two “availability zones” in Europe, and certain far less mass-market-oriented service providers – such as Verizon Business and IBM – have extended their offerings East of the Atlantic. But many of the well-known consumer offerings, of the GoGrid and Rackspace variety – are absent from the European market (though Eurpoean expansion is an obvious next step for Rackspace, at least).
ElasticHost’s services are based out of two UK data centers located near London. Davies says the product has been in public beta since November of 2008, and in development since March of that year.
The nature of “cloud computing” services is the subject of some debate, with some variation even among the services generally considered to be infrastructure as a service offerings. But ElasticHosts’ fit the most common criteria – virtual machines of customizable size, available for purchase by the hour (or for a monthly rate) and accessible via API.
The smallest increment costs £0.041 per hour, but a more elaborate and customizable pricing display is available in the product section of the company’s website.
Davies says there is more to ElasticHosts’ appeal than simply its location. Using Amazon for comparison (not a terribly unusual tactic in describing a cloud computing solution, owing to that company’s role as de facto cloud reference point), he says his cloud solution is designed, starting with the standard interface, to be more familiar to customers who aren’t necessarily programmers.
“It is a system that is closer to what a customer that is used to having with a physical server in his office – an IT manager or IT worker at an SMB, who doesn’t spend his time thinking about infrastructure – would be used to knowing how to handle,” says Davies.
He says the storage is persistent – the system uses virtual hard disks that behave the way the disk would on a physical server, so VMs can be easily rebooted and restored.
More to the point, the user interface is a point-and-click affair designed for an SMB IT user. The capabilities of a programming platform are there (and the API can be used to access the service), says Davies, but the interface presented by default is more of a simple web forms interface.
“We believe we’d got something that is simple to use for an end user who is coming from a traditional physical server background,” he says, “who doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about these things.”
The company’s tactic for attracting business is similarly simple – it is offering a free trial of the service, for which users can sign up on the website.
“You get four days of free capacity on the system,” says Davies. “It’s a full production system, so the interface you get is the same as if you’ve actually purchased it. You can install software and run multiple services on the trial account and see how it works.”
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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