Amazon better watch out for the new sheriff in town. ProfitBricks claims that is can offer more powerful and cheaper instances to customers than Amazon Web Services can. What makes ProfitBricks different from its competitor is it has a different take on scale. Amazon has a massive scale-out architecture while ProfitBricks focuses on a vertical scale. Customers are able to use 1 to 48 processors and 1 GB to 196 GB of RAM that they can pay for by the minute instead of the hour. Amazon EC2 instances only come with 1 to 16 virtual cores and 1 GB to 60 GB of RAM.

ProfitBricks also offers an all-Infiniband backend and  a graphical deployment tool that allows users to design their own cloud infrastructure. All they have to do is drag-and-drop their servers, load balancers on the screen, which avoids input-intensive spreadsheets that are used to plan resources that will be deployed in other clouds.

Those expected to use ProfitBricks over Amazon are e-commerce and media companies that have inconsistent workloads that either need to scale up or down quickly. Paying for an hour of AWS when only a few minutes had been used would be a big waste of money, so it only makes sense for those companies to pay ProfitBricks by the minute.

The company has been running in Europe for six months, give or take, with over 70,000 servers and has recently entered the US market. Although ProfitBricks has something significant to offer, the attempt to steal business away from Amazon will be a huge challenge since Amazon has already established a name for itself and people are more familiar with it.

”It all comes down to marketing. If no one knows now unique your cloud is, and that it’s faster, better whatever, it won’t matter,” said Melanie Posey, research VP for market research firm IDC, who finds ProfitBricks to be “intriguing,” though she is skeptical about how the message will get across.