Managed hosting provider UKFast has put on its big boy pants and taken a swipe at AWS.

Aside from criticizing AWS’ customer service capabilities, UKFast has also questioned data sovereignty and whether it is a play thing of the US government, as well as highlighting it’s substantially lower prices than the American giant.

UKFast does in fact charge £32/month for 10TB of bandwidth out to the public internet, which is in fact cheaper than AWS, though the UK outfit does not have anywhere near the same scale and breadth of capabilities.

“It’s been great for our industry having AWS enter the market as it’s encouraging innovation and forcing everyone to up their game,” said UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones.

“But it’s easy in business to become a victim of your own success and I believe that AWS, due to its size, is already unable to match the level of support provided by some of the smaller British hosting and cloud outfits.”

While this move could largely be seen as a cheap shot, AWS hasn’t exactly been buried under a wave of complaints in terms of customer service. How UKFast came to the conclusion it should attack the US giant for sloppy customer service is unknown, but it’s an interesting tactic, even if it does hint of inferiority complex.

The shot does seem to be well timed however, as it comes only a couple of days after AWS launched Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud-based contact centre service. The new offering will allow customers to create a ‘Virtual Contact Centre’, with no infrastructure to deploy or manage.

“Ten years ago, we made the decision to build our own customer contact centre technology from scratch because legacy solutions did not provide the scale, cost structure, and features we needed to deliver excellent customer service for our customers around the world,” said Tom Weiland, VP of Worldwide Customer Service, Amazon.

“This choice has been a differentiator for us, as it is used today by our agents around the world in the millions of interactions they have with our customers. We’re excited to offer this technology to customers as an AWS service – with all of the simplicity, flexibility, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of the cloud.”

Although the cheap shot from UKFast is unlikely to be registered by the cloud giant, it will be interesting to see whether UK businesses are able to capitalize on the uncertainty of Brexit over the coming months. With AWS and other US cloud companies likely to raise prices in the UK, there could be opportunity for players such as UKFast to swoop in and undercut to capture new customers.

Or it might just complain on the sidelines and be ignored.