SingleHop, a cloud provider for non-enterprises, takes $14.8M in debt

SingleHop, a provider of cloud-based infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses to run their applications, has raised a $14.8 million round of debt money.

SingleHop has been growing quickly in recent years, and it wants to keep adding services and people, the company said in a statement announcing the news earlier today.

Meanwhile, public clouds and and web hosting services from publicly traded companies continue to gain traction.

Like IBM’s SoftLayer public cloud, SingleHop provides entire servers for companies to rent on a monthly basis, as well as slices of physical servers in SingleHop’s data centers, right next to applications from other customers.

SingleHop also lets companies set up their own private clouds based on the VMware vSphere virtualization software for running lots of little virtual servers inside of each physical servers. Such clusters are cordoned off and reserved for a single company.

Infrastructure-as-a-service clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have been adding customers and boosting revenue while also dropping prices. Google is coming up quick, too. VMware has been pushing a public cloud, too, to hook in with companies’ existing on-premises data centers. And in the meantime, hosting companies like DigitalOcean and Linode have been growing.

However, cloud and hosting provider Rackspace — once the one to beat — isn’t growing like it used to. This means good things for alternatives, including SingleHop.

SingleHop customers include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Harvard Medical School, Konica Minolta, and USA Today. The company maintains data centers in Chicago, Phoenix, and Amsterdam.

To date, SingleHop has raised in excess of $42 million. SingleHop announced a $27.5 million round of venture funding in April 2012. Silicon Valley Bank participated in this financing, along with Farnam Street Financial.