UKCloud cuts prices ahead of public cloud battle

Managed hosting provider reduces prices for Cloud Storage and Enterprise Compute Cloud products

Managed hosting provider UKCloud has reduced prices for its Cloud Storage and Enterprise Compute Cloud products ahead of increasing competition from public cloud providers.

Cloud Storage is now available for 1.5p per gigabyte (GB) per month for large-scale users - a reduction of 66 per cent; while smaller users will see the price drop 77 per cent to 2p per GB per month.

Prices for large virtual machines on the Enterprise Compute Cloud product will also be reduced by 43 per cent from 1 February.

Speaking to CRN CEO Simon Hansford said that increasing demand for UKCloud's services has led to lower supply costs and more automation - the savings of which have been passed on to customers.

He added that, while the firm would usually wait until later in the year to make the reductions, he wanted to capitalise on Microsoft's 22 per cent price rise, after the vendor launched its UK datacentres last year.

Despite the hype surrounding the Microsoft and AWS UK datacentre launches, Hansford said that he isn't expecting UK hosting firms to suffer - adding that if anything it will speed up cloud adoption.

"It's competition and they will win business so that's good news for them, but I do think the market is growing so rapidly that actually, to some extent, it gives some credibility to the marketplace - so they'll help generate the market," he said,

"I also think you need to be very aware of what they're really doing. They've announced UK datacentres [but] they're tiny.

"It's not their own build datacentres that they own - they're in co-locations facilities [and] the co-locations facilities that they're using are smaller than our datacentres.

"Most of their UK customers are not going in those UK datacentres. What they're really doing is a PR win. It doesn't mean that customers are going to use them; there is only going to be select customers [in them]."

Hansford criticised the lack of investment he argued AWS and Microsoft are making in the UK, claiming that no jobs are being created as a result of the datacentres, and also accused them of creating vendor lock in.

He claimed that as end users build applications on AWS and Microsoft Azure it will not be possible to move them over to other hosting providers - a point he said is being critically overlooked.

"They're trying to get people to develop applications to their platform that are feature specific," he said.

"If you write an application to either Amazon or Azure it will not migrate to the other platform or any other provider - you are locked in - and I don't think many CIOs understand that.

"They think ‘I'll move it to Amazon and in a year's time if Azure is cheaper or I fall out with them I'll move provider'. You cannot do that if your developer has sat and written application-specifically."

However, Dan Bailey, founder at MSP and AWS partner Altinet, told CRN that, in his experience, moving applications between public cloud providers has not been a struggle.

"One of things that we saw with AWS, and with any public cloud or any software-as-a-service, is that it's infinitely easier to move [an application from one to the other]," he said.

"What happens in the traditional sense of having a piece of hardware or appliance is it tends to not be updated to the latest firmware [and] it kind of gets tied in like ivy with other applications that go into it.

"Public cloud makes it less significant to have those legacy applications. You find a lot less of them and can't have them like you used, to so I wouldn't necessarily agree with that."

"We're still in the pretty early stages of public cloud, but migrating away from pieces of software or services that are put there, especially when you're talking about AWS or Azure - every software provider will have, or will develop very soon, the ability to host in either/or; so moving from AWS to Azure, for whatever reason, is super easy."

Further cost cutting expect.

UKCloud is likely to announce further price reductions this year, Hansford said, most likely around the launch of G-Cloud 9 in April - and the UKCloud Oracle platform is set to go live later this month.

A new platform is also set to be announced at the beginning of March, but Hansford remained tight-lipped on discussing further information.