A casino-style booth is not what most people expect at a hosting conference, but Sharktech brought a piece of its hometown to CloudFest Americas. The company is based in Las Vegas, and Andrey Bayanov, its Head of Sales, said the theme was meant to entertain visitors, who have enjoyed it so far. The booth also stood out for having a large screen, something few others had.
Sharktech began in 2003 selling bare metal dedicated servers. Bayanov said the company later concluded that most customers now want to consume infrastructure through the cloud, so it built its own. The result is an OpenStack-based platform with a simple interface that he described as triple redundant under the hood. Because it is OpenStack, customers get the full API and can deploy from tools such as Terraform.
As for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, Bayanov’s answer comes down to size. Hyperscalers mostly sell to large companies, he said, and big buyers negotiate large contracts with good discounts. Smaller customers pay high rates and get little support, with no dedicated account manager or phone number to call. Sharktech, he said, answers calls and messages within 15 minutes, and a banner at the booth advertised migration services for $1, with help planning a move that keeps downtime low.
Bayanov said he reviews pricing every quarter to stay competitive, since a smaller company cannot match hyperscaler marketing budgets. He said Sharktech guarantees at least 40% savings compared with hyperscalers, and at least 80% on bandwidth. Every subscription includes 20 terabytes of egress traffic a month, and extra traffic costs $1.5 per terabyte, which he put at less than a fifth of what hyperscalers charge on a standard contract. “We don’t build a virtual prison around you,” he said.
Visitors can request about $200 in credit through the contact form on the company’s cloud page, and Bayanov said customers do not have to move everything at once. Someone already on AWS can start with a few secondary workloads, evaluate the results and shift more over time, since both platforms can run side by side.
