Virtual hosting firm Dediserve has secured a €1m cash injection to fund an aggressive expansion plan for 2010 that will include local and European acquisitions as well as opening sites in additional data centres and growing its headcount.
The funding, which came from Carav Holdings, will be used to finance these plans as well as to market the company’s virtual server products and further develop its software platform.
With a growing base of international customers, Dediserve is planning to open up sites in data centres in the USA and UK, as well as in Dublin in the second quarter of this year.
“We hope to enable customers to choose their virtual servers’ location this year as more sites are opened,” explained Aidan McCarron, founder and managing director of Dediserve.
“The ability to offer hosting with IP ranges that traverse national boundaries will be of great benefit to international customers with critical hosting needs.”
Dediserve’s location
Dediserve’s offices are located in the Digital Depot in Dublin. Its infrastructure is housed in the Cable & Wireless data centre at Clonshaugh in Dublin.
McCarron is a former general manager of Register365, where he handled large accounts like Daft Media, Bord Gais and TV3. Recognising the potential for server virtualisation he fostered the technology behind the company’s virtual server products.
The company’s expansion comes as Virtual Private Servers (VPS) increase in popularity as a hosting solution due to their relative low cost and high resilience. Virtualisation enables server and data storage needs to be safely and securely pooled amongst a number of customers, removing the need for an expensive dedicated hosting service.
“Many businesses using their own servers, or a dedicated hosting service, are not likely to be using them to their fullest capacity. By outsourcing to a virtualised hosting provider, businesses need only pay for the capacity they need at a given time. This makes for substantial savings on hardware and running costs,” McCarron said.
Gartner estimates that 55pc of all new workloads will be deployed on virtual servers this year, up from 40pc in 2009.
In May 2009, IDC reported that in Western Europe for the first time ever, the number of virtual machine shipments exceeded the number of physical servers shipped, topping 2m units.
Dediserve has developed its own control panel and software to fast track and simplify the set up of servers, with a new server functional in less than 10 minutes. Packages start at €20 per month for 30GB storage and 512KB of memory, compared to the industry average of €200 per month for the cost of traditional dedicated servers.
“Virtualisation has massive potential as an alternative to dedicated hosting and offers the specifications to compete on performance, while vastly saving on costs. With our service we’ve opened up the possibilities for those still using older dedicated hosting to easily enjoy all that virtualisation has to offer,” said McCarron.
By John Kennedy
