HP has unveiled its first public cloud services in a late answer to rivals Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft and Verizon’s Terramark.

The computing giant will sell global content delivery, storage and compute as a service, starting with a “standard extra small” Linux instance with 1 GB RAM, one virtual core, and 30 GB of storage for four US cents per hour.

The entry-level instance comes in at half the price of Amazon’s small “default” Linux or Unix instance, but also at about half the capacity and power.

For a fairer price comparison, HP’s “standard small” instance offers 2 GB, two virtual cores and 60GB ‘local disk’ which, like Amazon’s US pricing, costs eight US cents per hour. Amazon’s default Singapore instance costs nine cents per hour.

Comparatively, Rackspace’s 2 GB RAM and 80 GB disk instance is priced at 12 US cents per hour, the same price as Microsoft’s one core, 1.75GB RAM small Azure instance.

HP will offer its public cloud services at half price until the public beta ends, although it did not disclose when that would be.

The company's senior vice president and general manager of Cloud Services Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh told Business Insider it was aiming to deliver a premium service and was not competing on price.

An HP spokesman said HP's Cloud Services will only offer Linux instances initially but HP may support the typically more expensive Windows compute instances in future.

HP’s beta bid for public cloud dollars also includes storage and a content distribution network (CDN).

HP will charge 12 cents per GB per month for anything up to 50 terabytes (TB) of storage, 10 cents for anything between 50 and 950 TB, and suggests to contact it if capacity requirements exceed a petabyte.

HP’s CDN pricing is roughly on par with rival platforms for most regions, but Australian customers will face double the price their counterparts in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore will.

HP set its "rest of the world" (row) price, including Australia, at 39 cents a gigabyte a month for use of its content delivery network. However, it highlighted that pricing is based on the location of the “billing address”, not where content is consumed.

It priced US customers pricing up to 10 TB of 16 cents per GP per month is higher than Amazon’s equivalently sized 12 cents monthly rate.