Pay by the hour data centre first?

Volta Data Centres has launched what it says is the UK’s first ever ‘Power by the Hour’ service at its Great Sutton Street (GSS) data centre. This new power consumption model is ideal for start-ups, small businesses and larger organisations requiring project based resources. It provides an affordable, zero commitment route for companies stepping into a cloud infrastructure or outsourcing to a colocation site for the first time.

Volta’s ‘Power by the Hour’ service is the first of its kind for the data centre industry. Businesses are charged on an hourly basis for the amount of power used, with charging beginning when their equipment is installed in the data centre. This service uses itemised billing to enable companies to accurately monitor their power consumption by the hour and only pay for what they have used. ‘Power by the Hour’ subscribers are charged by the Kilowatt hour, and benefit from 10Mbps of resilient I.P. bandwidth connectivity as soon as the company installs its equipment in the data centre. There is also no power reservation fee.

Jon Arnold, Managing Director, Volta Data Centres, explains, “There are many markets where an hourly pay plan approach delivers enormous benefits in rapid availability, flexibility and scalability. We believe that this disruptive pricing model - ‘Power by the Hour’ - is the very first initiative of its kind and offers an entry into a high specification data centre that would have previously been unaffordable to many smaller organisations, and for larger organisations that require project-type flexibility in their storage requirements.”

Arnold concludes, “Companies today are considering how to better handle their IT infrastructure and data storage needs. ‘Power by the Hour’ enables Volta Data Centre to offer a range of flexible billing solutions to all our customers and ensures that we can cater for everyone’s individual business needs.”