ElasticHosts blog

ElasticHosts is proud to have won Best Cloud Service at the Cloud Computing World Series Awards 2010.

Show Director, Mark Johnstone, announced that the quality of this year’s entries was extremely high, and tough choices had to be made even to arrive at a shortlist. “We are delighted with the number of organisations entering the awards this year” he said. “The quantity and quality of entries has been extremely high which can only be very positive for the future of business computing. Some very difficult decisions had to be made in getting to a shortlist of just three for each category.”

We are delighted that ElasticHosts has won from such a tough field, and look forward to providing our award-winning cloud servers to even more customers going forward.

First two providers already signed up; many further discussions ongoing

June 28, 2010, London: ElasticHosts, the international cloud provider, today announced the launch of the ElasticStack cloud platform (www.elasticstack.com), a powerful platform that enables hosting providers and data centres to offer own-brand cloud servers to their customers swiftly.

Built on the proven platform that underpins ElasticHosts’ own cloud services in the UK and US, ElasticStack is a complete turn-key solution for organisations looking to maximise revenues from cloud hosting services quickly. ElasticStack helps service providers offer their customers ultra-flexible and easy-to-use cloud server capacity, without any upfront investment or development work, and runs entirely on low-cost commodity server hardware.

Commenting on the launch of ElasticStack, Richard Davies, CEO at ElasticHosts, said, “As the use of cloud-based services continues to gain momentum, growing numbers of hosting providers are looking to offer own-brand cloud servers to their customers. Hosting providers and data centre businesses that sense customer demand for cloud can now simply license and deploy our proven technology. This dramatically improves the speed with which they can offer cutting-edge cloud server products to their customers, which is crucial in this fast-expanding market where time to launch is pivotal to success.”

Davies continues, “As we offer a complete turn-key solution, hosting providers and data centre businesses can focus on selling cloud servers to their customers under their own brands; we license our complete software solution and optionally also provide fully managed technical operations. We can run on pre-existing commodity server hardware or provide complete hardware and software solutions with our cloud-in-a-box hardware partners VeryPC.”

A number of service providers have already licensed ElasticStack with further discussions ongoing in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Existing licensees include Dave Cummings at OpenHosting who commented, “Building our cloud services on an existing platform helps us bring cutting-edge products to market swiftly, giving us a significant competitive advantage in our markets.”

Davies concludes, “The introduction of the ElasticStack cloud platform is a significant step in the development of ElasticHosts. We are proud to have recently expanded our own hosting business into the US, but we also understand that there are many service providers across the world that already receive enquiries about cloud every day and would be delighted to have cutting-edge products to offer their loyal customers. By helping these partners to launch own-brand cloud services swiftly, we instantly give them cutting-edge products to sell and leave them free to focus on what they do best and drive their revenues.”

About ElasticHosts

ElasticHosts produces the ElasticStack cloud platform, which enables service provides to swiftly offer ultra-flexible and easy-to-use cloud server capacity for scalable web hosting and on-demand burst computing such as batch processing, development & test, backup & disaster recovery and cloud bursting. ElasticStack is build on the proven platform that underpins ElasticHosts’ own cloud services in Europe and North America. For more information, visit www.elasticstack.com or e-mail sales@elasticstack.com.

Contact:

Champion Communications E: elastichosts@championcomms.com Tel: +44 (0) 207 268 3076

ElasticHosts attended the recent Cloud SparkUp unconference at the IIR Telecoms Cloud Services Summit, where we got involved in some interesting discussions about how Telcos could make money from the Cloud.

As you can see the discussions continued in the pub afterwards.

We will also be attending the next CloudCamp on June 30th, as part of the Cloud Computing World Forum. We encourage all of our readers and customers to register and attend this great event, and look forward to meeting you there!

ElasticHosts are delighted to announce that they are sponsoring the 2010 Mind Sports Olympiad (MSO), which will be held at the Soho Theatre during the last week of August. Anybody can enter — please take a look at the MSO website for more details.

The MSO, now into its 14th year, is an annual event that brings people together from around the world to compete for medals in mental-skill games, such as Chess, Poker, Draughts, Scrabble, Go, Settlers of Catan, Backgammon, Mental Calculations and many more. The original vision was to create an Olympic Games for the mind.

Our Sales and Support Manager, Anna Griffiths, has been a keen Go player for a number of years, and we are keen to support such pursuits.

ElasticHosts are pleased to announce that we now have a comprehensive FAQ section available on our website. We have tried to provide answers for all the questions that we get asked regularly, so this should now be your first point of call for any queries. We will, of course, continue to answer any other questions by email or phone, and we will be updating the FAQs with more questions as they arise.

We are delighted to announce that ElasticHosts has been shortlisted for “Best Cloud Service” and “Best SMB Product, Service or Solution” at the Cloud Computing World Series Awards 2010.

The winners will be announced at the Cloud Computing World Forum on Tuesday 29th June at Olympia Conference Centre, London from 5.30pm — we look forward to meeting many of our readers at that ceremony, and at CloudCamp London the following day.

US businesses can now use cloud servers which have taken Europe by storm

June 1, 2010, London: ElasticHosts, the UK-based cloud provider, today announced the launch of its cloud server solutions in the US. The offering, which will be available from San Antonio Texas from June 1, provides ultra-flexible and easy-to-use server capacity for scalable web hosting and on-demand burst computing. Customers will benefit from a user-friendly interface that can be managed from any desktop and allows them to create virtual servers instantly and resize their capacity immediately.

The launch into the US follows ElasticHost’s huge success in Europe, which has seen growth of more than one percent every day since August 2009. With the launch, ElasticHosts becomes the second cloud hosting provider in the world to offer cloud servers from data centers in two continents to serve the needs of its customers. With the exception of Amazon, every other provider operates cloud servers in either Europe or North America, but not both.

Commenting on the company’s entry into the US, Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts, said, “Having facilities in both the US and the UK means we can now serve both markets with local cloud servers, offering fast direct network links and data storage within local jurisdiction and data protection regimes to both European and North American customers. We are really excited to be moving into the US and look forward both to helping our European customers expand and to reaching new US customers.”

ElasticHosts’ cloud servers allow customers the cost-efficiency of buying exactly the capacity they need today, with the peace of mind that they can immediately scale up or down as required. Capacity is billed on-demand by the hour, unlike traditional hosting contracts which tie customers to fixed capacity for up to two years. The servers run any PC operating system, are fully configurable and designed to accommodate all forms of web hosting. ElasticHosts offers a 100 percent SLA with 100x credits for downtime, supporting mission critical hosting needs where business continuity is vital.

Davies, continues: “To date, businesses looking for the cost savings and scalability of cloud hosting have had to tackle complex user interfaces and have been limited to a handful of server sizes offered by different vendors. We have designed ElasticHosts so that it can be used by almost anyone – it allows users to configure their servers specifically to suit their requirements. With our expansion into the US we are aiming to capitalize on this ease of use and offer customers on two continents a competitively priced, familiar experience when they move to the cloud. This reduces the need for training and dramatically speeds up deployment, leaving our customers free to focus on what they do best and drive their revenues.”

To mark its launch into the US, ElasticHosts is offering a free five-day trial to allow businesses to experience the power and simplicity of cloud hosting for themselves. Full details are available at www.elastichosts.com.

About ElasticHosts

ElasticHosts provides ultra-flexible and easy-to-use cloud server capacity for scalable web hosting and on-demand burst computing such as batch processing, development & test, backup & disaster recovery and cloud bursting. ElasticHosts offers competitive pricing for both subscription and burst use, outstanding performance for any PC operating system, fully flexible sizing, three independent data centers covering both Europe and North America, and a 100% SLA with 100x credits for downtime. For more information, visit www.elastichosts.com or e-mail sales@elastichosts.com.

Contact:

Champion Communications E: elastichosts@championcomms.com Tel: +44 (0) 20 7268 3076

ElasticHosts will be exhibiting at Internet World next week, Tuesday 27th — Thursday 29th April at Earls Court, London. We will be joining our partners Peer 1 Hosting on stand E4000.

Richard Davies, our CEO, will be joining Dominic Monkhouse of Peer 1 on Wednesday 28th at 10:45am to speak about “Enabling X-as-a-service”.

Please drop by and see us on stand E4000, where we will be happy to meet you and answer your questions. We are looking forward to a great show, with a great stand, and we will also be running a special promotion, so it is an event not to be missed!

The ElasticHosts team will be at TechCrunch GeeknRolla on April 20th for what promises to be a great day bringing Europe’s technology startups together.

We encourage all of our readers and customers to register and attend this great event, and look forward to meeting you there!

This afternoon, we completed the last step in a series of upgrades which we started on 1st February. Since then, we have:

• Updated all of our virtualization hosts to the latest Linux kernel 2.6.32 and Qemu-KVM 0.12.2.
• Significantly expanded our capacity in both of our UK data centres, particular at London BlueSquare (lon-b)

Our customers now benefit from:

• Improved virtualization performance, particularly for disk I/O
• Better hardware emulation, in particular a new virtual BIOS
• Improved memory management on our virtualization hosts

Thank you to all of our customers for working with us through these upgrades — we are committed to providing best-in-class performance using the latest stable versions of the cutting-edge KVM engine, and are pleased to have brought these significant improvements online.