UKFast CEO: 'Expansion gives us room to grow 17 times bigger than we are now'

Investment in expanded operations is part of wider £4m project, says CEO

Hosting provider UKFast has upgraded its UK infrastructure to give it the space to accommodate its growth plans, CEO Lawrence Jones told CRN.

The network expansion will see three new points of presence (POPs) across the UK and is part of a wider £4m project by the Manchester-based firm.

"As we grow, we use more bandwidth and so this expansion is giving us enough headroom to grow probably 17 times bigger than we are at the moment, and we'd be able to still be comfortable," he explained.

"This is a significant investment, but it should give you an idea of how confident we are as an organisation and how important we believe this is.

"We're a cloud organisation, so our network is key to all of our customers, and our connectivity and our peering is also important. It's very important to keep expanding and growing this area of the business - it's the lifeblood of our organisation."

Jones was coy on what else was to be expected from the £4m project, but said that it is about building new POPs, its CDN capabilities, and strengthening its DDoSX cyberdefence network, which he said are all able to be spun out to multiple locations.

"First and foremost, we need to expand the network; it improves our resilience as well and it creates new peering and transit opportunities," he added.

"Most of this is about protection and safety and just planning for the future.

"As a business owner, it's important to continue to invest in your organisation - if you're not growing, you're dying.

"One of the things we have to do is keep up with demand - we're expanding our e-cloud platforms significantly.

"We've never charged for bandwidth - I know AWS and Azure profit from that - but we don't want to start charging. In order to maintain high-growth websites, it's important that we continue to invest and continuously make our network bigger."

Last year UKFast took on outside investment for the first time in its 20-year history, when Inflexion Private Equity took a 30 per cent stake in the business, raising its valuation to £405m.

However, Jones said that its network expansion plans were already in place and were in fact used to woo the private equity house.

"This was part of our plan that we presented to Inflexion prior to them getting involved with us," he stated.

"We're not changing our direction - Inflexion and UKFast are very aligned with continued growth.

"In our industry, you can't rest on your laurels, you've got to continue to invest in your platform. We've been synonymous with speed and resilience and we need to make sure that we keep investing to ensure that those are at the front of our mind."

Last year also saw the hosting provider expand its network with POPs in Amsterdam, Washington and Seattle. Though it does not have offices in those locations, Jones hinted that it was "dipping its toe in the water" in that respect.

He hopes that there will be further network expansion in Europe beyond its Amsterdam POP, though that is entirely dependent on customers.

Those international POPs, though, provide the ability to expand its other offerings to those locations, Jones added.

"I would see the likes of Amsterdam [as an opportunity] to expand our products out to those locations too," he said.

"As our business evolves, our network has to evolve and then our products can therefore reside and sit within the network and service a much wider audience.

"We have to see what goes through Amsterdam and then work out where the traffic is, and see where our customers want us to expand.

"It's not whether we think it would be a good idea, it's where our customers tell us where they need a POP. We've always been a business that has listened to our customers and invested off the back of their advice and their requests."