Last year was a blast for UpCloud. We had tremendous customer growth, and some really exciting additions to our product portfolio as well as most competitive cloud pricing. Needless to say, this year we are developing our service and its features even further. We do not see ourselves as a “yet another IaaS platform” and the market seems to agree – looking at our growth already in January. However, in order to think about where we are going, it is important to gain a view on where we are at right now. For this, we’d like to recap some things we announced in 2014.
Chicago Datacenter and MaxIOPS Storage
In Fall 2014, we opened a data centre in the US (Chicago) and also launched our MaxIOPS storage backend.
UpCloud unveils MaxIOPS storage backend as it opens shop in US
— Gigaom (@gigaom) November 18, 2014
UpCloud was also covered by other tech sites such as Computerworld, CIO, ArcticStartup and Informilo on our MaxIOPS and Chicago launch.
We also did some performance benchmarks where we compared some of the relevant IaaS providers to our MaxIOPS powered instances. Our CPU performance was on par with AWS, Google and Azure while our I/O performance blew everyone out of the water! Also, please note that our instance was the least expensive (by far) in this comparison. Read more at the review
Although Chicago, London and Helsinki is a good start for a global presence, our plan is not to leave it at this. Same goes for our service features – MaxIOPS is just the beginning. Stay tuned, we have some exciting announcements to make this year as well!
UpCloud Was the Hosting Partner of Slush 2014
Last year’s Slush had 14 000 people visiting the event from 79 countries and there were about 30 000 active users on their site plus lots of API requests from mobile apps during peak hours. The IT consisted of a load balanced rest API (Django) and a load balanced WordPress site, among other things. We did a detailed post on how UpCloud hosted Slush, in case you want to learn more.
Antti @vilpponen, the CEO of UpCloud spoke about startups challenging the big players. Story on Slush News #slush14
— Slush (@SlushHQ) November 18, 2014
Preparations for Slush 2015 have already begun and the Slush IT team is planning to keep working with UpCloud. We have been pleased to hear that our infrastructure is trusted by Slush and fulfils all the high reliability requirements they have for a business critical website.
451 Research’s Virtualization Price Index finds UpCloud’s cloud pricing most competitive globally
UpCloud’s cloud pricing quote for the Virtualization Price Index by 451 Research was the lowest of all the providers ($0.29 per hour) and more than 60 percent below the average price ($0.73 per hour).
— UpCloud (@upcloud) November 10, 2014
The VPI index has been built by getting quotes for a similar application stack from cloud providers including AWS, Google Compute Engine and Azure known as the “Hyperscalers” and numerous other, smaller cloud hosting providers. You can find more information about the study by visiting 451 Research’s website.
Looking forward
Here’s what our CEO, Antti Vilpponen has to say about this year and where we will be headed.
We enjoyed a phenomenal 2014 and I can’t thank enough our customers and our talented team who made it possible. We were able to launch MaxIOPS which is an industry defining service unlike any other. It’s performance and price is something customers aren’t used to from other providers. We also continued expanding our international reach in the form of our new Chicago datacenter.
Looking forwards, we have some very exciting plans for our service and customers this year. While we do not disclose upcoming features or service improvements or their launch dates – there will be plenty to go around. A clear priority for us is to offer more datacenter capacity in new geographical locations around the world. In addition to this, we are looking to offer some very clearly anticipated features in the coming months.
Something that has been clear to us from the start of our journey has been our desire to learn from our customers and how they anticipate the industry to develop. Let’s continue this discussion this year as well – we have thoroughly enjoyed this and see it as a key component in developing our service in the way that it adds the most value to our customers.
That’s it for now – if you haven’t had the chance to test UpCloud yet, please do so by signing up through the link below. You’ll get to enjoy a free trial period testing out our service.
Links:451 Research – Cloud Price Index and Virtualization Price Index.
Photo: blinking idiot (CC: BY-ND)
