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LeaseWeb was founded in 1997 by Con Zwinkels and Laurens Rosenthal and originally set up as a web design firm.
These days it has positioned itself as a global hosting provider after an increasing demand from the games industry to move gaming experiences online.
Developers now looking to offer functionally smooth multiplayer titles and create permanent online worlds with the capacity to facilitate thousands of players simultaneously.
To help meet these ambitions, LeaseWeb offers its own dedicated hosting services, cloud hosting and custom hybrid infrastructure solutions, while also allowing a dev’s own hardware to be housed in its data centres.
The company manages the data centre facilities and hardware, whilst it asks its customers to manage server OS, application and database levels.
“From speaking to many gaming companies in the industry, this is a perfect fit,” says LeaseWeb business development manager Paul Grimwood.
“Gaming companies don’t want to have to worry about the hardware logistics, the repairing, the data centres, the networks.
"They want to develop their games, manage the applications to fine tune when needed, and focus on their core business: games.”
Grimwood claims that the tech firm looks to differentiate itself from its rivals by standardising its server offerings and making it a cost-effect hosting solution.
He also says that its network offers a bandwidth capacity of 2.3Tbps to countries around the world, peaking at 1.3 Tbps on a daily basis.
Grimwood believes that the industry is also heading toward ‘hybrid infrastructure solutions’, meaning the company now offers a selection of its services in one package to fit a developer’s growing needs.
“We are asked to build infrastructures combining dedicated server infrastructure with our cloud services, content delivery network services and/or even colocation racks,” Grimwood explains.
“Using several types of technology together offers the customer with a lot of benefits. For instance, customers can place their CPU intensive database services on our dedicated server infrastructure, get computing capacity from our cloud and pushing bandwidth through our CDN services.”
As for the future, LeaseWeb is currently looking on expanding its cloud and CDN functionality and integrating this into its self-service customer portal, whilst it is also looking to build further data centres throughout new regions.
