ElasticHosts

» see elastichosts.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ElasticHosts closed on 30 June 2020, and the company said so itself, on a page headed "ElasticHosts is closing" that had been sitting there for months beforehand. The copy is unusually plain for this kind of notice. All products and services would close down with the brand. No further payments would be taken, any credit on an account would be consumed until termination, and the support team was standing by to help customers export their data. Anyone who wanted to stay in the family could move to tsoHost, the larger hosting business ElasticHosts had become part of. Anyone who did not could move to a third party.

The service had launched in March 2008 out of London. The legal shell was older: company number 03888886 was incorporated on 1 December 1999 as Arachsys Networks Limited and only took the ElasticHosts name on 17 June 2008, so a company from the last month of 1999 sits underneath the whole thing. At its widest the service ran from ten data centers, two in Britain at Maidenhead and Portsmouth, then Amsterdam, Toronto, Hong Kong, Sydney and four American sites at San Jose, Los Angeles, Dallas and Miami.

Nothing on that list is closer to me than Amsterdam, which measures my distance from this company precisely enough. ElasticHosts sold to people provisioning infrastructure by the hour in markets where it had put metal on the ground. Turkey was never one of them. An engineer here who wanted a machine in 2012 rented it from a Turkish host or took the latency to Germany, and the brands that mattered in that decision were not this one.

~ the record ~

~ how it billed ~

The technically interesting thing about ElasticHosts was the pricing model, which refused the shape everyone else had settled on. Amazon and Rackspace sold instances in sizes, small and medium and large, each one a fixed bundle you had to buy whole. ElasticHosts charged for processor, memory, disk and network as four separate meters, so a customer could build a machine with a lot of one and almost none of another. If your workload was memory-hungry and processor-light, you stopped paying for cores you were not turning.

It was also, by its own claim, the first public cloud built on KVM rather than Xen, back when that choice still counted as an engineering position rather than a detail. The underlying software was sold on as ElasticStack, licensed to other companies who wanted to run a branded infrastructure cloud of their own without writing one. Solid-state disks arrived across every instance size in 2012. For a London company of that size, competing against Amazon on architecture rather than on price was a defensible place to stand for about a decade.

~ the last page ~

The closing notice was still up on 26 July 2020, nearly four weeks after the date it announced, still reading "ElasticHosts will close on June 30th 2020" in the future tense. By 4 August the whole site had collapsed to three sentences under the logo, and that remained the site for the next two years: "Elastichosts is now closed. Thank you to all our customers. We wish you well." Below them sat a login link that went nowhere and a terms of service link nobody would ever need again.

~ what replaced it ~

What happened afterwards is in the register rather than the press, and the register tells it better. On 30 June 2021, an exact year after the service stopped, the members resolved to wind the company up, and two insolvency practitioners from 15 Canada Square were appointed. The procedure was a members' voluntary liquidation, which is the solvent kind. Nobody seized anything here. The company settled what it owed and then chose to stop, which is rare enough in this business to be worth recording. Howard Smith took over as liquidator on 10 June 2022, and dissolution followed on 5 April 2023.

The last accounts on file are made up to 31 December 2018, which means the final eighteen months of trading never got a public set of numbers. What survives instead is a registered office address care of a restructuring firm on Fleet Place, and a customer-facing page that spent two years thanking people. Most dead hosting companies leave a parked domain and an angry forum thread. This one left a receipt.

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