Cloud server provider enhances core service with SSD performance boost and UI update

London, 5th September, 2012: ElasticHosts, the cloud hosting provider, has today announced significant enhancements to its core cloud server offering. The changes will see customers benefit from an improved user interface, whilst also being able to provision Solid State Drives at all server instance sizes, offering a higher level of performance for high I/O applications and heavy database uses that were previously considered unsuitable for public cloud environments.

Previously, ElasticHosts offered cloud servers backed by traditional spinning Hard Disk Drives (HDD). ElasticHosts has now expanded its offering to include hosting on high performance Solid State Drives (SSD), offering customers more choice and flexibility in running large websites and complex applications. The new SSD options are available today in ElasticHosts’ London Portsmouth zone and will roll out rapidly across the company’s data centres in UK, US and Canada.

The performance benefits of SSD hosting are game changing for customers with high I/O applications and databases. SSDs offer tens of thousands of random read/write input/output operations per second (IOPs) compared to hundreds of IOPs for HDDs. This means that SSDs allow data to be accessed around 250 times faster than with standard hard drives, meaning latency is virtually imperceptible, servers and applications boot instantly and websites and applications are much more responsive. Large heavy database uses typically have extremely high I/O requirements – with SSD cloud servers, these customers can migrate to the cloud without performance concerns.

Virtualisation running on HDDs combined with inflexible hosting packages has previously meant that running complex applications and large websites in the cloud has been a slow and costly process. With the introduction of SSDs, customers can now choose to include this as part of their cloud hosting package and get massively improved performance on a flexible, PAYG basis. Furthermore, ElasticHosts SSD options are available to all customers regardless of the amount of computing resources they use. This means that businesses of all sizes can host their websites and applications with higher performance, from financial services right through to SMEs.

“We are pleased to offer the option of cloud hosting based on SSD drives to all of our customers”, said Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts. “While HDDs are fine in most cases, in certain instances customers need greater performance. The SSD options will be particularly attractive to those customers looking to move high performance databases to a cloud based infrastructure-as-a-service model. As the cloud market matures, offering SSD is the next step for us. Some cloud providers have offered SSD with only their largest, most expensive server instance sizes, but we believe that all of our customers should be offered the benefits of improved computing power and greater resiliency.”

ElasticHosts’ flexible cloud hosting allows customers to take control of their hosting and scale server capacity according to demand, using the self-service web control panel. ElasticHosts has now updated this control panel, improving response times and simplifying management of large accounts. Advanced Ajax functionality means that when customers scale their virtual servers they can now see their changes made instantly in real time. Customers running large groups of virtual servers also benefit from a clearer overview of the structure of the server clusters in their account. All this gives customers a more immediate view of their cloud hosting and better visibility of their servers.

Davies continued, “ElasticHosts has always strived to deliver a service that is flexible, easy to use and responsive to changing demands. Our service puts control of cloud hosting into the hands of the customer and improving the interface is the next logical step in giving even greater control and improving experience for our customers, regardless of whether they are running one server or many clusters of servers.”