Cloud Computing: Size Doesn’t Matter In IaaS Game, ElasticHosts Says

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

ElasticHosts has launched a new style of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to challenge Amazon, Rackspace and other major cloud service providers with its own brand of cloud services.
ElasticHosts announced Feb. 5 that it has nine data centers around the world, and it’s possible all nine would fit into one of Google’s or Microsoft’s.

But size is not the point. ElasticHosts CEO Richard Davies says it’s competing with Amazon on price while giving customers a simpler user interface to configure exactly the servers they want, instead of having to select from the coffee shop list of small, medium or large. There is a growing number of small cloud service providers, many of them operating strictly on a regional basis, such as PeakColo in Denver and Phoenix; Bluelock in Indianapolis and Salt Lake City; or CoreVault in Oklahoma City and Cheyenne, Okla…

ElasticHosts is a small service provider with global pretensions and a global network of data centers to back it up. It started out as a hosted service provider and got into IaaS in 2008, a little after Amazon Web Services established itself in 2006. It had five data centers in Europe and North America until Tuesday, when it announced four more to give it more of a global reach. The new data centers are in San Jose, Calif.; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and Hong Kong. They complement two data centers in its hometown of London, one in Los Angeles, one in San Antonio and one in Toronto…

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