Freshosts wants to bring affordable utility computing to the masses! The start-up, which is backed by Jamcamedia has just launched an innovative hosting service.

Freshosts uses a system of clusters of specialized servers, an approach typically seen in enterprise hosting, which can offer advantages in redundancy and performance. The company was built from the ground-up as an alternative to discount dedicated servers, which have been enormously popular with power users.

Accounts start from £7 a month. Traffic load balancing and mitigation of denial of service attacks are included in each account, along with the ability to combine Windows and open source technologies on a web site, running ASP and PHP pages from the same web directory.

There are significant differences with dedicated server solutions as well, as Freshosts offers FTP uploads but not shell or root access.

Freshosts True Hybrid technology is different, according to Mike Lee, sales manager at Freshosts, as its system checks each file, sending Windows and Linux pages to clusters using those platforms. "As a design shop, you may get a client that has legacy code on their site that uses one technology, and you want to work with another technology," said Lee. "This way, you can keep what's working and build on top of it.

As with most cluster systems, the key to Freshosts success is the management software, which has been under development for nearly two years.

We are looking to collect beta participants before the site goes live in May 2006, said Lee. Beta participants will be able to test the service and then give feed back to the team at Freshosts.
"There's a big sense of energy at Freshosts," said Lee. "All of the team believes what we're doing could really change things in the world of hosting.

If you would like to be a beta participant you can email sales@freshosts.com with your details. We have also started to take pre-orders for the service at www.freshosts.com. Were you could also be one of ten that gets Freshosts free for 6 months!
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