Cloud hosting service Host Virtual expanded into a larger datacenter in Chicago, CH1, or CoreSite’s location in the city. The datacenter will not only help to serve the company’s demands in the US’ third most populous city, but throughout the midwest region of the country as well.

HostVirtual’s moved into the CH1 facility next to The Chicago Board of Trade at 427 S La Salle, which is home to the city’s commodities exchange.

The 183,000 square-foot space, secured with biometric and keycard security, is located on major fiber optic rings and in close proximity to cloud service providers and financial service firms. The improvements in the CH1 building means HostVirtual’s customers will be able to deploy their websites faster and better serve their end users in the city and the surrounding area.

In addition, HostVirtual’s joined the Coresite exchange. The company will be able to access premium bandwidth with its participation.

“Moving into an expanded datacenter next to Chicago’s Board of Trade building means we can better serve our customers by offering them a location in the city and its financial institutions,” Host Virtual Senior Vice President Sandy Bhargavi said. “Finance is one of the major industries in this city, but it’s also a gateway to the midwest. As connectivity in the US, and around the world, increases, so does the need for websites to be better able to serve users by being able to have a server location in their general vicinity.”

The improvement to Chicago’s datacenter is the latest of HostVirtual’s ongoing server upgrades. The company expanded its European and New York presence and added Toronto as its 16th location.

Host Virtual offers BGP Anycast, load balancing, and worldwide CDN support with its cloud hosting infrastructure as a service, or IaaS. Over 300 operating system templates can be deployed by the company’s customers to its datacenters that utilize native dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 support.

About Host Virtual, Inc.

Host Virtual, Inc. is a cloud hosting provider that operates dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 IaaS clouds worldwide. Built around scalability, self-service and ease of use, Host Virtual customers can deploy Linux, VOIP or FreeBSD servers to any location within minutes. Free from the hassle of complicated, pay-per-minute or per-resource plans, Host Virtual customers can deploy to any of its cloud locations with unlimited usage for a low, flat monthly fee starting at under $10 per month.

For more information about Cloud Hosting or Host Virtual, Inc.’s Cloud VPS hosting and virtualization services, please visit http://www.hostvirtual.com/.

British web host UK2 and not-for-profit Start-Up Loans are partnering to offer free web hosting to new businesses. Any company receiving funding from Start-Up Loans is eligible for the free service, and then for 50 percent off a 2 year hosting package through UK2 when the 6 months are over.

Start-Up Loans is a UK government initiative which concluded its pilot period in March 2013, and has provided over £73 million ($121 million USD) in funding to over 14,000 companies.

“We’re pleased to partner with UK2 as the majority of our start-ups have a website or are in the process of building one,” Elliot Gold from Start-Up Loans said. “Having complementary web hosting for the first six months, then a discounted rate thereafter will mean that their budget will go that bit further.”

Not only does the partnership lower cost for new ventures which tend to be challenged by overhead costs, it gives UK2 a privileged position with start-ups. By the time the discount plan runs out, UK2 will have had two and a half years to prove their merits to those companies still operating.

The SMB cloud market is expected to reach $95 billion by 2015, and GoDaddy has specifically focused on sole proprietorships and start-ups to grow its already-huge business stateside.

In addition to benfiting UK2’s relationship with its home market’s small businesses, the partnership may also benefit UK2’s branding and public relations.

“Partnering with Start Up Loans is a perfect match as it provides something each recipient needs and offers us the opportunity to give back,” Sara Cunha-Rego, the marketing director for UK2 said.

Zurich, Switzerland – CloudSigma, a public cloud IaaS provider with advanced hybrid hosting solutions, today announced that it has enhanced its solid-state drive (SSD) storage offering with highly-granular, affordable snapshot management technology to improve data protection and access in the cloud. Now, customers can seamlessly and cost-effectively incorporate enterprise storage strategies into their cloud infrastructure while meeting complex compute requirements. With CloudSigma’s snapshot management capability, customers are not only able to snapshot live running drives, but also clone them to create full drives to run separate VMs from.

The new drive can either be at the same site or a second site, assisting with off-site data recovery and eliminating companies’ cloud backup concerns. Off-site backup is easily managed from the WebApp, allowing CloudSigma to not only guarantee that IOPS bottlenecks are avoided thanks to its SSD storage, but that data can be recovered on a drive-by-drive basis. As one of the few cloud providers that offers this level of granularity, CloudSigma is uniquely able to meet companies’ custom requirements and complex workloads, ensuring enterprise information is highly-available, regardless of its dataset type.

“CloudSigma’s storage management technology reveals the power of live snapshotting to greatly improve data access in the cloud,” said David Hill, principal, Mesabi Group. “It’s not only able to copy drives for effective, cloud-based disaster recovery, but also applies to other practical use cases like allowing companies to create a fully functional copy of a production environment for testing and development to show what would happen when any changes are put into production. It’s scenarios like this that are helping customers appreciate all the benefits of what CloudSigma’s live, granular snapshotting can mean for their computing environment.”

The new snapshot management technology is fully integrated into CloudSigma’s existing platform. Customers are able to completely automate their snapshot management processes by creating snapshot management policies. These policies allow customers to define scheduled snapshots, snapshot retention policies and more. Multiple policies are possible and each policy can be applied to one or more drives. This approach is eliminating the time and cost needed to manually manage storage in the cloud. Companies can also further save on resources because CloudSigma only charges for the incremental data stored on a per GB basis, with no added premium.

“What’s great about our snapshot technology is that it is completely non-disruptive,” said Robert Jenkins, CEO, CloudSigma. “Once the drive snapshot is created, an exact replica can be generated quickly at any time based on that snapshot. This replica can then be used as a ready-to-go replacement, should a disaster occur. Combining this with our existing private patching capability, companies can also easily pull that clone back into their private compute environment, as if nothing happened. We are truly transforming storage management in the cloud, even for companies with the most complex compute and security needs who can now make our public cloud a key part of their business continuity strategy.”

CloudSigma CEO Robert Jenkins will be speaking at Storage Visions 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada during the session, Up there, Somewhere: Opportunities and Challenges for Consumer and Enterprise Cloud Storage. The session will be held today, Monday, January 6, 2014, at 1:30 p.m. PT. If you are a member of the media or analyst community and are interested in setting up a meeting at Storage Visions this week, please contact Meredith L. Eaton via email cloudsigma@marchpr.com or phone +1 617-960-9877.

About CloudSigma
CloudSigma is a pure-cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider that’s enabling the digital industrial economy through its highly-available, flexible, enterprise-class hybrid cloud servers and cloud hosting solutions, both in Europe and the U.S. CloudSigma is the most customizable cloud provider on the market, giving customers full control over their cloud and eliminating restrictions on how users deploy their computing resources. With CloudSigma, customers can provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources as they please, as well as extend private networks out of existing infrastructure and elastically into CloudSigma’s IaaS cloud to create easy to manage and transparent hybrid cloud solutions. For more information, please visit www.CloudSigma.com.