Upcloud claims world's fastest cloud hosting storage


    With Slush as the excuse to make some noise, Helsinki-based Upcloud shares they’ve launched the world’s fastest cloud hosting storage backend at just 20 cents a gigabyte. Looking over the graphs and information sent over by the company you can see that comparing services does get complicated, but as a comparison, similar performance on Amazon Web Services if it were technically possible would cost 87 times more.

    Thankfully these benchmarks have been recognized by third parties with 451 Research putting Upcloud as the most competitive in terms of pricing, hitting prices 60% below the index price. Additionally comparison site Serverbear clocks Upcloud as having the fastest storage backend of all the cloud hosting companies they compared.

    Upcloud’s special sauce is their proprietary technology powering their cloud services, like the recently released MaxIOPS storage backend that should offer read performance up to 19 times better than the best of AWS.

    “However, we wanted to go beyond the obvious and with MaxIOPS technology we’re able to deliver up to 400 000 IOPS to a single virtual machine – that’s comparable to the performance of 8 enterprise-grade SSDs”, explains Joel Pihlajamaa, UpCloud’s Founder and CTO.

    These are some tall orders coming from a fairly small team, but Upcloud CEO Antti Vilpponen (Editor’s note: Former CEO of ArcticStartup) tells us they’re able to do so by focusing on a niche.

    “The catch is that we’re not offering as wide a service offering as AWS. We’re focusing on pure servers and the technology there. We don’t want to build technological lockups with managed services, such as the Amazon RDS, etc. So some might see this as a short coming, but we’re focused on providing the best pure bred infrastructure service only.”

    The company has also just opened up their Chicago datacenter in addition to their Helsinki and London-based locations. UpCloud tells us they are cash-flow positive and will be opening up a new service area in South East Asia next year.