Hosting solutions provider ElasticHosts today launched a new scalable cloud-based service designed to offer highly flexible and easy-to-use web hosting and on-demand burst computing capabilities.

ElasticHosts is trying to differentiate in an increasingly crowded market, dominated by giants such as Amazon Web Services, by offering small to medium sized businesses an interface which even non-IT professionals will be able to use.

Capacity is billed by the hour, giving customers greater flexibility than some competitors which tie users into contracts of fixed capacity for much longer periods, according to chief executive Richard Davies.

"We realised that cloud computing was the next wave of hosting, and that a flexible on-demand model was what the market wanted, so for the last six months we've been running this in beta," he said. "It's designed to be as easy and as like running a physical server as can be."

The ElasticHosts servers are designed to run any operating system, and the firm is offering a 100 per cent service level agreement with 100x credits if downtime does occur.

A free trial is available on the ElasticHosts site for 100 hours, with the capacity to run one medium or several small servers totalling 1,024MB memory.