Servers.com, a hosting company with a focus on dedicated bare-metal servers that launched in Europe in 2005, today announced the opening of its first U.S. data center location. The new Dallas data center currently only offers dedicated servers, but it will soon also play host to Servers.com’s shared cloud hosting servers.
U.S. pricing starts at a competitive $97/month for a 32GB Dell R220 server and currently tops out at $513/month for a Dell R430 server.
Until now, Servers.com was mostly focused on its Amsterdam location. But as the company’s COO Nick Dvas told me, he believes that while the U.S. is very different from Servers.com’s home market, “with a way tougher competition,” it’s also “way more rewarding in terms of market size.”
He also believes that there is still lots of room for a dedicated server business in the U.S. That’s partly driven by the current move to containers, he said. “Containers are particularly important because they are easy to use, close to the hardware and have less overhead,” he said. “So they allow you to get all of the benefits of a bare metal server.”
In addition to containers, though, he also sees demand for standing up private VMware and OpenStack clouds on the service. One thing Dvas argues makes his service stand out is that it offers private 40 GBPS networking between servers, which can potentially speed up your overall cluster when you need to send a lot of data back and forth between machines. In addition, the company also offers 20 GBPS private networking between its European and U.S. data centers.
The next step for the company in terms of product development is now to make it easier to onboard users by giving them the ability to set up machines with pre-installed software with just a few clicks.
“We now have data on what our customers need, so we will make it easier for them to install what they want,” Dvas said. The first of these products will likely center around containers, though the company’s exact plans are still in flux.
Looking ahead, Servers.com — which is bankrolled by its holding company XBT Holding — plans to open another U.S. location, likely on the East Coast.