Bangalore: Twitter raced ahead of Microsoft and Rackspace in leasing the largest amount of datacenter space in 2013, becoming the biggest leaser of third-party datacenter space.

According to a report by Avison Young, the U.S. real estate firm, Twitter topped the list of firms which struck deals to rent and build datacenter space last year. It struck a major deal with datacenter space firm RagingWire in Sacramento, to lease a 20 megawatt (MW) facility. The company also took 5MW facility with QTS in Atlanta last year.

Facebook, Google and Microsoft have their own in-house datacenter facilities for maximum efficiency; however, Twitter, which has a over 230million active users, prefers to lease its datacenter space from third-party providers as this offers faster expansion of a setup, helps manage capital spends in locations where it is expensive to operate datacenter facilities and handle the constant growth in its server and storage requirements. Twitter’s decision to operate from leased datacenters has skyrocketed the fortunes of RagingWire.