LeaseWeb, a privately held Dutch-based hosting provider, is setting up in the US with the idea of competing against Rackspace, Amazon and Softlayer. It says it'll be cheaper.

The company is one of the largest hosting providers in Europe. OCOM, its parent company, is one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the Netherlands. It offers dedicated servers, colocation, cloud hosting, content delivery (CDN) and hybrid solutions.

LeaseWeb has hired William Schrader as CEO of its USA unit. Schrader was co-founder of the world's first commercial ISP, PSINet, which dominated the market in the 1990s and was good for $16 billion at its peak, serving a reported 60% of the Fortune 500 in 30 countries. He previously had an advisory role at AIS Network, the managed, cloud and applications hosting provider.

LeaseWeb has a data center in Northern Virginia near Washington, DC and has collected some SMBs as initial customers to start.

Schrader says LeaseWeb will set up a redundant data center on the West Coast next year so it can go into the cloud business. Online gaming, streaming video and advertising networks don't necessarily need a cloud right away.

LeaseWeb USA's solutions offer network uptime of 99.999% and a capacity of 2.5 Tbps. Its growing infrastructure spans eight data centers in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Brussels and Washington, connecting with major telecom carriers. LeaseWeb is connected to 22 Internet Exchanges across Europe; in the US it peers on seven major markets (New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago and Dallas).