British cloud server provider
ElasticHosts has cut its service costs by 50%. To facilitate the reduction, the company, which has headquarters in London, has launched “Elastic Containers” - what it calls “next generation cloud servers” and a technology which could “disrupt the cloud market”.
ElasticHosts offers a range of cloud server options alongside more traditional virtual machines, managed cloud servers and reseller programs. The company has a global customer base located in around 60 countries and manages 9 data centers located in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and countries in Asia.
Using Elastic Containers ElasticHosts’ customers are charged for consumption rather than capacity. According to the company, this is the first solution able to do this and billing in this fashion means the company is able to pass cost savings on to customers. The solution is available to the company’s Linux customers and it does not require software or server configuration – ElasticHosts’ customers register for the service and the system automatically makes capacity “continuously available”.
Elastic Containers also features auto-scaling which automatically increases and decreases capacity based on customer needs. The feature means customers can avoid setting capacity requirements manually. Additional performance is provided by the use of Solid State Drive (SSD) storage, an approach which is significantly more effective that traditional storage solutions. Elastic Containers also avoids the requirement for companies to engage in load balancing and reduces disaster recovery costs by avoiding the need for backup servers.
"We've analysed hundreds of servers from some of our largest customers and noticed two major differences: firstly, a server running a typical workload will see 50% cost saving versus other major IaaS clouds, since typically less than 50% of total capacity is used through a full weekly cycle,” explained ElasticHosts’ CEO and co-founder, Richard Davies. “Secondly, a server which frequently runs below its peak capacity, either due to idle periods or because it only occasionally needs to handle a large load, can save 75% or more. To help customers take full advantage of these savings, we are billing in 15 minute intervals based on usage, as opposed to the common industry practice of hourly billing based on available capacity."
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