Hosting firm UKFast is slashing the price of its self-service, open source cloud platform eCloud Flex, as the cloud price battle with Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to rage.
UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones is upping the ante against the US cloud giants he claims are providing poor value to UK businesses and taxpayers; with eCloud Flex instances now available up to 44% cheaper.
With the popularity of the UK-based OpenStack cloud service accelerating in the last year, UKFast has achieved significant efficiencies and economies of scale in CPU, RAM and disk space.
Jones said: “It’s been great for our industry having AWS enter the market as it’s encouraging innovation and forcing everyone to up their game.
“But it’s easy in business to become a victim of your own success and I believe that AWS, due to its size, is already unable to match the level of support provided by some of the smaller British hosting and cloud outfits.
“US businesses have to adhere to the US government’s demands, so there are still many unanswered questions around data sovereignty.”
eCloud Flex is available on a Pay-As-You-Go basis, with discounts of 20% for a 12-month contract, 25% for a 24-month contract and 30% for a 36-month contract.
Jones said: “There’s a huge amount of confusion around the way some elastic, burstable cloud products are priced. Customers end up paying a lot more than they expected as hidden costs emerge.
“Some providers charge you per hour for load balancing and then again based on the number of connections or amount of data processed. Our focus is on delivering a simple, flexible pricing model where you get what you pay for. We are prepared to go a great deal lower on pricing as we continue to innovate.”
eCloud Flex allows developers to programmatically build and spin up anything from individual VMs to entire virtualised hosting platforms with the provided OpenStack APIs.
“The popularity of Flex hasn’t been a surprise, but it’s enabled us to scale the product and now we’re passing on the benefits to our customers. The investments we’ve made in our data centres mean we are now offering cloud at an even more competitive price.
“The important thing is that the UK business community has British options.”
