Maureen O'Gara

LeaseWeb, the Dutch-based infrastructure provider, is expanding its public cloud infrastructure to the US, figuring to be cheaper than Rackspace and Amazon.

The multi-tenant widgetry is designed for maximum redundancy and uses the open source CloudStack platform Citrix turned over to the Apache Foundation at its core. It likes KVM for virtualization and its fast network-attached storage is based on a Nexenta platform.

The hungry newcomer is offering four CPU and memory packages ranging from $16 a month to $99 a month.

Sixteen bucks will buy a single core machine with a half a gig of memory, 40 gigs of storage and 500 gigs free bandwidth. Ninety-nine bucks buys quad-core VMs, four gigs of memory, 160 gigs of storage and the same free bandwidth. All instances are automatically firewalled and it just takes a credit card.

LeaseWeb says Rackspace is three times more expensive and Amazon's pricing is so complicated it's hard to estimate.

Customers can spin up and scale cloud servers at the push of a button complements of a portal designed to provision and manage the high-speed networking, compute, memory and storage resources.

The launch is part of the company's strategy to expand its global IaaS footprint. It's targeting SMBs, non-US businesses and the finance, real estate and insurance sectors.

LeaseWeb entered the US market in January 2011 with a new headquarters and data center in Virginia that offered customers instant physical servers. Now it's supporting virtual resources too. LeaseWeb USA CEO William Schrader says, "Our historical success underpins this latest development as we take our first step into the US cloud market."

Robert van der Meulen, LeaseWeb's cloud manager said, "The launch of LeaseWebCloud in the US is a particularly exciting step in LeaseWeb's global cloud offering. Many of our customers have been asking for the product in the US as they want to build infrastructure that spreads across European and American data centers; we've listened to them and here it is."

LeaseWeb, which is part of the OCOM Group, one of Europe's largest Internet infrastructure and hosting companies, claims 15,000 customers ranging from SMEs to enterprises services like BMW, Bose, Kasperksy Labs, Starbucks and Wikimedia and includes support for public cloud, private cloud, hybrid hosting, colocation and dedicated hosting.

It's got more than 50,000 servers under management and has provided infrastructure for mission-critical web sites, Internet applications, e-mail servers, security, and storage services since 1997.

The company operates eight data centers in the US and Europe with a total capacity of more than three Tbps.

LeaseWeb partners with Microsoft, VMware, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Juniper, cPanel and Parallels.