Elastichosts, a British Amazon wannabe, is setting up in Silicon Valley to be near potential cloud customers like start-ups and other small to mid-sized concerns.

It’s already got a data center in Los Angeles. The new San Jose site will give it redundancy.

It’s also opening new data centers in Hong Kong, Sydney and Amsterdam, expanding out of London, Toronto and San Antonio, Texas.

All it can offer at this point is compute and block storage but it wants to take on Amazon and Rackspace at roughly the same price points. It claims its widgetry is more flexible and easier for non-technical people to use because of its web user interface.

It apparently has a wider variety of instances and flash than Amazon and claims “a higher level of performance for high I/O applications and heavy database uses.”

CEO Richard Davies says to figure 50 cents a gigabyte a month.

The company claims 1,000 customers in the UK (40%), Europe (20%) and North America (25%).

Davis says the firm, which only took about $500,000 in angel funding a few years ago, is profitable.

Besides cloud servers, Elastichosts offers managed cloud servers, cloud web sites and various reseller programs. It says its expansion will benefit businesses globally, giving them a local data center and eliminating transcontinental lag, ensuring greater resilience, a choice of jurisdiction and billing in local currency.