Texas-Based Firehost Promises Unconstrained Clouds For The UK

Cloud computing is repeating all the sins of the outsourcing industry, says a new start up that aims to free customers from the shackles of long contracts, rigid terms and conditions and system configurations set in stone.

Texas based cloud hosting provider Firehost has appointed a UK sales and channel guru as it begins its European expansion. Firehost claims it has tripled its size in a year, and is looking to repeat this rate of growth in the UK, by offering better levels of service.

No long contracts?

Ken Nathan-Amissah, recruited from consultancy Broadjump, has been given the brief to recruit resellers in the UK. Speaking at Cloud Expo in London, he promised that Firehost would not imprison its customers in year long contracts with suffocating limits on performance.

“Firehost offers a monthly contract, so we constantly have to prove ourselves to our customers,” said Nathan-Amissah. The year long contracts that the outsourcing and cloud industries have imposed on clients do them no favours at all, he argued. By breaking this simple rule, Firehost disrupted the cloud services model, he claimed.

Similarly, Firehost claimed it can offer elasticity on other resources. “Companies often get clobbered if they exceed their agreed thresholds,” said Nathan-Amissah. This has punished end users who find it impossible to predict demand in an industry where demand is characteristically, he argued. “We’ve built bursting into the system so you can scale up and down at will.”

According to Firehost, it is the first cloud host to free its customers from the constraints of a dedicated server, preferring to split all its client data across the entire server farm on its Equinix hosted Slough data centre. This, claims Nathan-Amissah, gives a performance dividend as it means that data can be called in quicker.

Nathan-Amissah dismissed the idea that the channel has no role in cloud computing. “We’re on a ridiculous growth curve and we need channel partners to help us repeat that in the UK,” he said.