| Type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Cloud computing |
| Headquarters | London, UK |
| Website | elastichosts.com |
ElasticHosts Ltd is a London based company, founded in March 2008[1], which provides an international cloud infrastructure service, currently provided from five data centres; near London (two sites), San Antonio, Tx, Los Angeles, CA and Toronto. It uses Linux KVM virtualization to provide operating-system-agnostic cloud servers.
ElasticHosts is privately held and competes in the cloud computing hosting space with other public cloud-infrastructure providers such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Rackspace Cloud.[2][3][4]
ElasticHosts' most interesting points of variation from other cloud hosting platforms are that its EU hosting data centers are in the UK and not Ireland, it is the first public [5] cloud service built on Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (rather than Xen), and it has an API that has been given a good review from a REST perspective.[6] It is further unusual in that it charges by resources (CPU, Memory, Disk and Network) as separate entities, allowing its customers to build virtual machines with widely different characteristics instead of simply categorized ones, such as small, medium and large instances.[7]
ElasticHosts (and therefore licensees) are supported directly by BoxGrinder included in Fedora 15 as of May 2011.[8]
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ElasticHosts announced that they were extending to two more data centres in Los Angeles and Toronto in December 2011, making five locations of their own, as well as elasticStack Licensee locations. [9]
ElasticHosts philosophy, according to CEO Richard Davies, was to create a virtual infrastructure providing servers that behaved in a manner as similar to setup as possible to how one would provision dedicated hosting, with the exception that the customer can self-serve at any time.[10]
ElasticHosts announced in the fourth quarter of 2011 that they were changing their user interface to a new look. This is now available to all customers as an optional beta. [11]
For comparison to other infrastructure providers, ElasticHosts only has persistent storage, based on local host store. It does not use SAN, but instead has local-to-host RAID arrays, with iscsi interconnects between hosts. ElasticHosts does not have a cloud storage product, but have stated that they are working on one for 2012, along with a newer distributed storage system. [12] [13]
ElasticHosts has two types of IPv4 addresses - static and dynamic. Both are allocated from the same pools of addresses, but static addresses are kept by the account, and can be allocated to any account's server at any time. Dynamic ones are randomly allocated for any server that has not been specifically allocated a static IP address. These are not guaranteed to remain the same, though remain for the lifespan of the instance. A shutdown of the virtual machine may or may not reallocate the IP address. Unlike Amazon, ElasticHosts does not lock a static IP to a server instance - they can be reallocated from the control panel. Reverse DNS is managed by the customer. IPv6 is not available yet, but they have stated they are working on it in email newsletters.
ElasticStack is the underlying stack system that ElasticHosts uses to provide cloud Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS).[14] This is available as a licensed product, and several other companies around the world use the same infrastructure, licensed from ElasticHosts Ltd, to provide their own branded IAAS cloud to their customers.