After eight months of hard work we have finally arrived at the beta launch of the ReliaCloud platform.  What started out as a simple conversation and whiteboard diagram is now reality due to a very talented group of developers, engineers, designers, support techs and marketers.  Who is ReliaCloud?  It’s the same people that make things tick at VISI, a privately held managed hosting and data center provider with more than 15 years of history.

When we started building ReliaCloud we focused on three core goals: reliability, elasticity, and affordability.

We wanted to build a cloud computing service that was more reliable than the commodity providers already in the market.  We didn’t want our customers to have to re-architect their solutions just to work reliably in the cloud.  And we knew customers needed enterprise-grade security and SAS70 certified data centers.

We wanted our customers to be able to scale from 10 servers to 100 servers – and back down again.  And we wanted them to have the option of doing this programmatically via an API.

Finally, we wanted to price our cloud services competitively.  Trying to figure out the cost of hosting in the cloud can be challenging.  So we tried to make our service pricing as transparent as possible.  What you get for the price is a slick web management portal, high availability, load balancing, 24×7 support, enterprise-grade security and a complete API.

Today is a day of rest but tomorrow we get back to work on a whole new set of features.  We look at this release of ReliaCloud as a “foundational release.”  It’s got all the basic features you would expect – and some advanced features you wouldn’t.  In a few weeks I’ll tell you more about our development roadmap.  I can’t wait to tell you what’s coming next!