Hosting company Atlantic.Net has expanded to the US West Coast, and got some attention by donating 100 percent of first month's revenue form the new San Francisco site to a local homelessness charity.

Atlantic.Net offers cheap hosting with solid-state storage, with micro-machines costing from 99c per month. It's been expanding internationally from its start in Orlando Florida, and and aims to cater to the Silicon Valley developer community with its fourth site, a 40,000 square foot facility in San Francisco provided with Vantage Data Centers and Telx - which will be raising money for Project Homeless Connect for the next few weeks.

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“The Valley is the heart of the developer ecosystem and it is our first priority to ensure that innovative startups in the area have the tools and support needed to further develop and grow their ideas and scale their platforms,” said Marty Puranik, president and CEO of Atlantic.Net. “It’s also really important to us to show that the broader tech industry understands that we’re all in this together, and we have to do our part by helping those that need it the most."

Project Homeless Connect is a homelessness awareness charity, which connects homeless people with volunteers able to provide practical help such as haircuts, healthcare, food and phones.

"In San Francisco, where we see innovation and success everywhere, I admire Atlantic.Net for committing to their community by generously giving to those who need it most,” said Kara Zordel, executive director of the Project.

Atlantic.Net promises small cheap virtual servers which can be provisioned within a minute, and offer a simple bundle of compute, storage and network. It has recently expanded into Toronto and Dallas. In July, the company told Datacenter Dynamics that it is negotiating an entry into Europe, hinting at possible sites in Amsterdam, Germany and London, but no details have emerged yet.

Far from seeing hosting commoditized out of existence, Puranik thinks there's a need for more expertise: “This cloud provider space is almost like glass blowing – it is becoming an art again,” he told us in July. “Software developers are becoming so abstracted from the data center (where they once managed servers and built out in scale) that they don’t know what to do any more in terms of the facility.”