UKFast is celebrating another successful year for its flagship cloud range, eCloud, as annual recurring revenue from its exclusively UK-based cloud service grows 38% in a year to ££13.79m.

UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones MBE attributes the success of eCloud to the support team underpinning it. The firm’s high level of customer retention has helped to deliver the robust growth figures, with 62% of growth in the last year generated by existing customers extending their services.

He said: “The reason we’ve grown eCloud so fast is we retain a huge percentage of our customers and help them grow, alongside bringing in new ones. The biggest differentiator with our cloud is direct access to people, and technology is about people. Our tech is supported by the very same team developing it and our customers value this massively.

“We’ve listened to what people want from cloud. We offer scalable, we offer lightning-fast and we offer ultra-secure. In my experience people are most interested in getting value for money and access to straight-talking, highly trained technicians. This level of detail isn’t something the mass cloud providers offer.”

The strong results come just weeks after UKFast was recognised as Cloud Provider of the Year at the prestigious CRN awards. Judges selected the company for it’s “superb customer support and excellent all-round value proposition of eCloud”.

Jones said of the award win: “We’ve been shortlisted for the CRN Awards a number of times but came up short. We’ve had our heads down for the last few years, working hard and looking into the innovation side of things, listening to our customers and building features that separate us from the crowd.

“The awards are well recognised and entered by the biggest names in the technology industry, so it’s an incredible recognition of the work the entire UKFast team has done in recent years.

“We’re also benefitting from the fact that it’s an entirely British offering. There’s a definite increase in people looking to buy British this year and it stands us in good stead for the future.”

Of a current overall revenue run-rate of ££42m, 32.5% is now accounted for by cloud services.

UKFast is among the largest independently owned hosting firms in the UK, employing over 300 people at offices in Manchester, Glasgow and London.