The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, will enable Webfusion to extend its offering and provide XCalibre customers with access to a variety of products, along with 24×7 support.

The remaining XCalibre business will transfer to Flexiant Ltd.

Webfusion, in partnership with Flexiant, will trial the FlexiScale cloud computing platform and it is hoped that FlexiScale will eventually be offered as a service to Webfusion customers.

Thomas Vollrath, Managing Director of Webfusion, comments, “XCalibre has an excellent portfolio of hosting products and we are delighted to partner with them.

“The acquired Xcalibre customer base will benefit from an increased product set and more choice in entry level managed hosting packages.

“We look forward to the opportunities to widen our portfolio and present these customers with a greater choice of hosting and web security solutions.”

Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre, comments: “This partnership with Webfusion is very important to us and will allow us to strengthen our focus on the continued development of FlexiScale platform and other software products.

“Our roots are in hosting but our passion is development and going forward this experience will shape our transition into and growth as a software and services company, pioneering cloud computing.”

Customers of XCalibre Communications will become clients of Webfusion with immediate effect.

There will not be any changes to control panels or services provided.

In addition, customers will benefit from Webfusion’s UK-based data centre, round the clock support teams and access to a wider range of products and services.

Webfusion is part of the Host Europe Group, which is owned by Oakley Capital.

WebFusion’s dedicated servers make use of the latest Intel Quad Core Xeon processors with Dell server hardware. Intended for performance with up to 8GB of RAM and ultra fast SAS disks, the devoted servers run up to 15,000RPM. WebFusion customers have access to a Tier 1 network, UK-based data centers and managed services.

The servers are presented on Ubuntu and Windows platforms with a choice of both fully managed or full root level access, providing users with flexibility, reliability, performance and security, says the company.

Mark Beyer, sales and marketing director at WebFusion stated WebFusion’s new dedicated server range is an excellent step towards future-proofing for our customers. Our upgraded systems provide an ideal, stable platform for businesses of all sizes and high-end users or resellers dealing with business websites.”

In presenting them with all-inclusive Web hosting to create online applications and websites to support their studies, the companies say that the service frees students from a university’s local area network.

All science, technology, engineering, mathematics and design university students within the UK will have access to the hosting offer for free throughout 2008.

The plans, which run on Windows Server 2008 beta, provide 500MB of Web space and 2GB of bandwidth per month. WebFusion also provides one SQL 2005 database, support and application development platforms including FTP access, ASP classic and ASP.Net 3.5, and PHP under FastCGI.

William Coleman, Web platform architect evangelist at Microsoft stated “Partnering with WebFusion, we’re giving students the ability to use the next generation of Microsoft Web technologies for free while running on a stable, high performance Microsoft Windows Server 2008 infrastructure, regardless of their locationOur aim is to have at least 10,000 students using the free hosting in 2008 and, with the support of WebFusion, we can grow this number year on year.”

Named Hyper-V, Microsoft delivered the public beta of its hypervisor-based server virtualization technology last month.