Atlantic.Net Hopes To Challenge DigitalOcean As It Expands To Europe And Asia

Atlantic.Net has been in the hosting business since it was founded in Gainesville, Fla., in 1994. For the longest time, though, the company was content being a regional player. But over the last year or so, it has been making a very concerted effort to expand its footprint and gain wider recognition, especially in the face of competition from fast-growing services like DigitalOcean, which offer a very similar range of features.

As Atlantic.Net CEO Marty Puranik told me, the company is now setting its eyes on Europe and Asia for its first international expansion as it hopes to become a national and global player.

The first stop for the company is London. “We are doing this because we see adoption and the developer community growing fastest here for Europe,” Puranik told me. Atlantic.Net already has quite a few users in the U.K. and most of those are based in London, so this makes for an easy — and well-connected — first location, but the company also plans to expand into other European countries soon.

In Asia, Altantic.Net will start with a data center in Singapore. As Puranik noted, the city-state offers a relatively friendly climate for international companies that want to do business there, but it also offers good connectivity to the rest of Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand for customers there. “The primary concern for our customers there is latency, which is worse than from Europe to the USA — obviously, since its farther,” he said. “By filling in this hole, we will greatly expand the reach and usability of our services to Asian customers.”

Talking about the company’s overall expansion policy, Puranik says that it aims to cover a few major locations first. “The idea is we will fill in the hubs first, then the spokes. So, we do plan to expand geographically beyond this to get closer and closer to our customers — for example, India, where many developers reside,” he said.

Over the last two years or so, DigitalOcean quickly cornered the market for VPS hosting. Atlantic.Net has its work cut out for it if it wants to challenge its well-funded competitor, but it’s good to see that it’s willing to put up a fight.

It recently rolled out $0.99/month SSD-based servers, for example, that — while low-powered — undercut virtually every competitor. It also now offers one-click installs for WordPress, Node.js, Docker, and the standard LAMP and LEMP stacks.

Looking ahead, Atlantic.Net will likely launch a couple of new services outside of the VPS realm, too, including a dedicated storage service.