Founded in 2011, António Miguel Ferreira and Charles Nasser are today combining their 17 years industry experience in founding and managing Internet businesses such as Claranet, Amen and Esoterica, to launch Lunacloud’s pay-as-you-go cloud services in the UK.
By focusing on delivering reliable, elastic and low cost cloud infrastructure services (IaaS), Lunacloud hopes to make cloud services, and their benefits more accessible and engaging to start-ups, tech businesses, developers and the technical community in general.
“The cloud has fundamentally changed the way we consume compute, store and network resources. We believe that lots of good technology is already available in the cloud but at the cost of simplicity. For demand to grow the cloud itself must be simpler, more reliable and less expensive if it is to gain maximum exposure in the sectors that could actually benefit from it the most,” said Lunacloud co-founder and CEO António Miguel Ferreira.
He added, “we do not ask for lengthy commitments, we do not propose long term contracts and we do not charge setup fees; you can scale up and scale down whenever you want, and you only pay for the services you've used, having real-time access to usage reports. It is for these reasons that we think we will be attractive to the British small business and tech sectors.”
Lunacloud provides Cloud Servers with any choice of RAM from 512 MB to 96 GB, 1 to 8 CPU cores and 10 GB to 2 TB Disk, running Linux or Windows and controlled via the web control panel or the compute API, from 1.3 pence per hour. This level of flexibility - 307,200 server configurations - is not seen elsewhere, as customers usually have to buy a pre-defined bundled server that might not be suited to their needs.
It also provides Cloud Storage, a virtual unlimited disk for object storage, accessible via a web browser or the S3-compatible API, from 5.8 pence per month per used GB.”
“We’ve taken cloud control and performance to the next level: a customer can create, delete or reboot a Cloud Server in less than ten seconds. But the most impressive aspect of our offering is the hot resize feature – allowing RAM and DISK resources to be changed on the fly, alleviating the need for a reboot.
“We directly compete with the likes of Amazon and Rackspace in our cloud offering, but we offer a simpler portfolio at a much more competitive price; and our personal touch is the speed and the hot resize features”, he finished.
The UK is the first European country to launch Lunacloud, but future plans include Portugal, France, Spain and the Baltic States in 2012; expansion to Germany and other European markets is set for 2013.
Being closely backed by Claranet - a managed services provider with its own pan-European IP backbone and datacentres - Lunacloud hosts its physical infrastructure in Tier-3+ datacentres, redundantly connected to the Internet, providing a secure and strong footing for its aggressive expansion plans. It has also partnered with Dell to provide its underlying physical servers & storage infrastructure.