Product: ProfitBricks' IaaS offering competes with Amazon on price and is in on the customizable VM trend, providing what the company calls Live Vertical Scaling that enables customers to reconfigure virtual servers -- for example, adding RAM to cope with peak loads -- without restarting. All x86 OSes are supported, and block storage snapshot/restore functionality is due to be added in April. The service uses Infiniband to provide connectivity speeds up to 80 Gbps from its data centers in Las Vegas and Karlsruhe, Germany. You will need to bring your own encryption and data integrity capabilities, however, and the company does not take part in the Cloud Security Alliance STAR program.

Company: ProfitBricks

Key Features:
Download ProfitBricks's feature matrix

Price Range:
ProfitBricks VMs start at $0.06 per hour for one dedicated CPU core, 1 GB RAM and 1 GB storage. Block storage is $0.09 per GB, per month, and in- and out-bound data transfers are $0.08 per GB. The company offers a 20% discount for startups, breaks up to 25% for resellers and a 14-day free trial.