I had a meeting with Alex Polvi (a founder) and Bob Hrdinsky of Cloudkick today. Over a Thai lunch. And then we followed up with a short discussion-demo at their office at the foot of Potrero Hill where I met most/all of their US tech experts.

Cloudkick runs a slick service that lets you manage your Slicehost and Rackspace/Mosso cloud servers (both brands are owned by and housed in Rackspace facilities), providing some data visualization in addition. Of course you could manage your servers using the control panels provided by Slicehost and Rackspace, but Cloudkick’s one-layer-removed management adds some unique extras. And they can “automatically” migrate your Amazon EC2 servers over to Rackspace if you’re interested in that. I have nine virtual servers on S&R (as I’ll call the two services) and signed up for the free Cloudkick services almost three months ago. They were voted Best in Show at Under the Radar (see Cloudkick writeup and video). The company is a little under a year old. It was kick-started by a seed investment by Y-Combinator, and recently obtained an angel round of investment. [Read more…]