Newcomer cloud infrastructure provider ProfitBricks, which earlier this year announced a pay-per-minute cloud service, is now offering startup companies one year of free cloud service.

Under ProfitBricks' Foundation program, companies with less than $1 million in revenue will be eligible to access its virtual data centers with the use of a cloud server for one year. In addition, startups can also receive a 20 percent discount for using other infrastructure services from ProfitBricks, including memory and CPUs.

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ProfitBricks is hoping to draw customers away from established infrastructure service vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Windows Azure.

"Startups are very important to us," William Toll, ProfitBricks' vice president of marketing, said in an interview with CRN Monday. "We want to deepen our relationship with the community and build a program around it."

Boston-based ProfitBricks shook up the cloud infrastructure market in September when it released a new data center architecture it says lets users access cheaper and more flexible cloud services with a pay-per-minute plan and the ability to change workloads on the fly.

Per-minute pricing differs from commonly used cloud server workloads with established cloud infrastructure providers. These providers require customers to pre-select server size with CPU, RAM and storage included, with servers added as needed and planned ahead in yearly, monthly and weekly increments.

Hewlett-Pack announced a pay-per-use cloud pricing structure last week as part of the new HP FlexNetwork Utility Advantage Program for communications service providers.

The HP program offers managed network solutions, including cloud services, on a pay-per-use basis, giving service providers delivering new revenue opportunities without capital investment, HP said.

The Profitbricks Foundation program has launched for New England-based companies, and will launch nationwide in early 2013.

PUBLISHED DEC. 17, 2012