The price of cloud hosting is quickly trending downward and the latest evidence for this comes from Atlantic.Net, a hosting service that’s been around since 1994. The company is launching a $0.99 per month VPS service today that comes with 256MB of RAM, 10GB of SSD storage, 1TB of outbound bandwidth and a choice of using Linux or FreeBSD as the operating system. Previously, the company was offering a similar service for about $4 a month.

Atlantic.Net says it is targeting this service at early-stage and bootstrapped startups that want develop on a dependable cheap server. With 256MB of RAM, the Atlantic.Net VPS should be able to run a basic development environment or company blog (though not much more), but the company is obviously also using this entry-level plan to create a bit of buzz and to get people to later upgrade to its larger plans.

DigitalOcean, which has dominated the mind share in the space lately, offers a $5/month plan with roughly double the capacity of Atlantic.Net’s new offering.

All of Atlantic.Net’s plans feature per-second billing and the company tells me that it can spin up a new service in about 30 seconds and resizing a server to add more capacity should just take a few clicks. The company currently allows users to host their servers in Dallas, Toronto and Orlando, with new locations in Europe and Asia coming soon, too.

“We want to invest in our customers to help them get going with their ideas while at the same time growing the cloud market ten times and making this a global phenomenon,” Marty Puranik, the founder and CEO of Atlantic.Net said in a statement today.

I asked the company how it thinks it’ll be able to make the economics work. “We think if we invest in our customers, when our customers are profitable or ready to put servers into production, they will invest in us by choosing plans that allow us to make a profit,” a spokesperson told me. “The goal of what we’re doing isn’t just to take market share, but to grow the market 10x. There has never been a time in history where technology costs came down and usage didn’t go up on products people want.”