One of bitcoin's biggest mining infrastructure providers, BitFury, has launched a new hosted mining service for business customers.

The company claims the scheme will provide customers with "optimal and reliable" – but low-cost – hash power to maximise the return on their investment.

BitFury says its ASICs and specialised mining hardware have established it as the market leader in both constructing and managing computing centres for mining operations. According to the company, approximately 40% of all bitcoins are mined using BitFury-made chips.

DigitalBTC

and CryptX became the first clients to use BitFury's managed mining services, which are not available to all customers.

The firm says its computing centres are managed around the clock by a team of engineers and benefit from locations with low energy prices.

BitFury secured $20m in funding

earlier this year, investing much of this capital into expanding already extensive mining operations in Finland, Georgia and Iceland. The company says it constructed a new 20MW data centre in Georgia in just 30 days.

Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury said in a release:

CryptX and DigitalBTC, the two clients trialling BitFury's managed mining services, say they are pleased with the performance so far.

Last week DigitalBTC, the first bitcoin-centric company to trade on a major mainstream stock exchange, reported its quarterly earnings. The figures revealed that the company has already managed to recoup its original $4m investment in BitFury-branded miners and services.

“We’ve found the BitFury Group to be an invaluable partner as we have built up DigitalBTC into a significant bitcoin miner and the world’s first listed bitcoin company alongside our other bitcoin operations," said Zhenya Tsvetnenko, the company's executive chairman.

Bert Valkenborgs, CEO of cloud mining firm CryptX, commented that professional hosted mining operations are likely to be the future of the mining market.

BitFury is not the first company to offer comprehensive hosted mining services. Cloud mining started taking off last year and UK firm CloudHashing led the way, offering bitcoin mining-as-a-service in mid-2013. CloudHashing eventually merged with HighBitcoin to form PeerNova, which now sells mining infrastructure services at an enterprise level.

Bitcoin ASIC designer CoinTerra announced several hosted mining services back in May, starting at $999 for a 12-month 200GH/s rental. The company said the move will allow it to deploy orders more rapidly than its competitors, making the most of its hardware.

Images via BitFury