LeaseWeb To Open Virginia Data Center

European hosting provider LeaseWeb will expand into the U.S. market next year as the first step in a "major global expansion," the company said today. Leasweb will open a new data center in Manassas, Va. in early 2011 to serve both current clients and new customers. LeaseWeb’s managing director Con Zwinkels says a number of existing clients have pre-signed sales agreements to be part of the initial launch in the U.S.

LeaseWeb, part of the Ocom group of internet companies, offers dedicated servers, colocation and tailored infrastructure solutions for enterprise customers. Based in the Netherlands, LeaseWeb was founded in 1997 by Zwinkels and Laurens Rosenthal while they were college students running the business on a single server in an attic. The company now has 30,000 customer servers spread throughout five data center locations in Amsterdam and Brussels and peers with more than 20 internet exchanges in Europe and the U.S.

Ocom also owns Evoswitch, which operates a climate-neutral data center in Amsterdam that supports operations for Wikipedia, Logica, NTT and Codemasters.

"The United States is one of the most competitive hosting markets in the world," Zwinkels said. "We expect the new LeaseWeb datacenter to be very attractive to our many global customers seeking the same hosting services and connectivity in the United States as they receive in Europe.

"There is a large market for the quality and value LeaseWeb offers its customers," Zwinkels added. "We plan to increase our share of the worldwide hosting marketplace, by offering LeaseWeb customers high value data infrastructure options, and technically advanced hosting products and services to meet client needs.”