Flexiscale, a new UK-based on-demand computing service aimed at Web 2.0 startups plans to compete with Amazon’s EC2/S3 service. The move – announced at today’s Future of Web Apps conference in London – is significant because there are so few ‘pay as you go’ hosting solutions in Europe, so the launch of a new service shows there’s real demand of this kind of scalable hosting for startups. Speaking to a few people about this space, I hear that architecturally Flexiscale could well have a better product than Amazon. That’s a big claim. But perhaps one of the key feathers in Flexiscale’s service is that (as well as Linux) it supports Windows while Amazon only does Linux, and offers an SLA, which the latter doesn’t. For more detail on this check out TechCrunch UK.

See our recent coverage of Nirvanix, a U.S. based S3 competitor as well.