UKFast has significantly reduced the cost of its cloud services following the news that AWS dropped its prices earlier in the year.
Its open source cloud platform eCloud Flex is available with a 20% discount when customers sign up to a 12-month contract, 25% discounts for 24-month contracts and 30% off when companies sign up to a 36-month contract.
UKFast decided to offer such savings because it believes current pricing models offered by public cloud providers like AWS are too complicated for the average user. It wanted to offer a simple pricing structure that would offer value for money minus the confusing structure.
“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," Jones added.
“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.”
Although Jones slammed AWS for the way it operates, he commended the company for being innovative and bringing new services to the market, paving the way for smaller businesses to enter the arena.
"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," he said.
“US businesses have to adhere to the US government’s demands, so there are still many unanswered questions around data sovereignty.”
“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," Jones said. “The important thing is that the UK business community has British options.”
At the beginning of the year, UKCloud also announced price cuts to its Cloud Storage and Enterprise Compute Cloud products, reducing costs by a whopping 66%.
