Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : Review of StormOnDemand cloud server hosting by LiquidWeb

[hdpixel]

Pictures of the control panel are available here. I would like to say that I am an everyday visitor to the forums here and hardly participate.

This is an initial review and steps on how I moved a site to Liquid Web Storm Cloud Servers, http://www.stormondemand.com/.


I have few dedicated servers and VPS across many leading vendors. (Wired Tree, LiquidWeb, lpdedicated.com). I usually have four medium e-commerce sites per Hybrid servers and one of my customer, as it is often the case, spent money advertising and received a lot of traffic and orders. It was great for him but my other customer started complaining. So, I had to find a solution fast while minimizing down time and have everyone happy.


It has been in my mind to try Liquid Web new cloud server hosting, http://www.stormondemand.com/. I thought that my situation would be ideal to solve the problem on hand. So the traffic continued to slow down the existing server (cpu intensive due to db transactions), and I immediately move the second biggest e-commerce site to LiquidWeb. I left the busy e-commerce site alone since they were getting orders and let just say that you don’t want to interrupt that process.


Below, I have outlined the steps I took to move a site from an existing hybrid vps server (WHM) to a Cloud server (WHM). The transition was very smooth and I am very happy to know that my customers are happy and I can rely on a vendor such as LiquidWeb. Our mutual goal is to provide top notch service. I now have the ability to meet the growing demands of my customers and continue providing reliable web hosting that match our excellent web master services. Thank you LiquidWeb!


These were the steps. (let me know if you want more details)

1. In WHM, I immediately lowered the TTL value for the domain and A record. I lowered them from 14400 to 300.

2. I ordered the new cloud hosting from LiquidWeb
A) An easy process which took about ½ hour.
B) WHM was really setup when I first login. I made some standard changes to make it more secure.
C) I immediately sent request to “support” about wanting an additional IP address (I received a response within 15 minutes). BTW, the ticket creation is within the cloud control panel which makes it very convenient.
D) The cloud control panel (in networking option tab) allowed me to request the IP (wrote down the IP).
E) In WHM, I added the new IP address.

3. I set a friendly message in old server for visitors to come back again in two hours (this is to backup the e-commerce database). I immediately continue on step

4. From the new SET UP server and WHM, I copied the account from another server.

5. WHM copied all settings from the other server and applied an available IP address for the SSL.

6. Re-installed the SSL in the new server

7. Set rDNS for user’s domain within the cloud hosting control panel. I also added/updated entry for the domain in WHM

8. I immediately verified and edited the A record on the old server to point to the new server location.

9. It took approximately about 2 hours for the DNS propagation to take place.

10. The moved was smooth and customer was taking order as soon as the propagation took place.



PROS
====
1. Fast migration

2. Liquid web team are very helpful and courteous. The ticket system is fast! The guys are available 24/7 and ready to listen for any issues.

3. The cloud server control panel is fast and easy to navigate. See screen shots.

4. The servers are very fast! Excellent options to configure the server in any way you want to. The default installation of WHM/Cpanel is clean and flexible enough to implement any owner’s preferences.



CONS
====
1. This is going to sound weird but I can not find one right now. Stay tune or come back later and ask me.

2. Perhaps, I wish some bandwidth was included. Like 25-50 or even 100gig per month. However, if the customer demands a fast web server and reliability, it is going to cost them.


Screen shots
==========
Scroll down the page to see screen shot of the "Cloud Control Panel"
review-storm-on-demand-cloud-servers.html


______________
Giovanni Arteaga
Reliable web master services in Los Angeles, CA (Southern California).
http://www.hostquattro.com

[hosteur]

Nice reviews, keep updating us later...

[TroyMcD]

Yeah I'd personally like a tad of bandwidth to be included as well, and/or drop the price of bandwidth even more.

Bandwidth should be a commodity nowadays.

[InfiniteTech]

Originally Posted by TroyMcD

Yeah I'd personally like a tad of bandwidth to be included as well, and/or drop the price of bandwidth even more.

Bandwidth should be a commodity nowadays.

If they providing a higher grade traffic mix (better than the 'premium' already available for VPS/Dedicated) then this would make sense. But since it is the same (aren't they?), bandwidth prices should drop and be atleast comparable.

[lucy61]

Is this(storm) better than MT's DV Hosting

[jpminus]

I recently tried their stormondemand as well and was impressed. I agree with your pros. Very easy to use control panel and performance seemed really good (though I admit I didn't push it too hard). Their support was really responsive and helpful as well.

The only con I had was in their pricing structure. There are no intermediate steps so to go from a 2GB to 4GB level doubles your cost.

[Samuraid]

I've been using/testing Stormondemand for a while now, and it has been a great experience.

I agree with the previous review about it being a very stable and fast service with a very clean interface.

There are a few issue that hopefully LiquidWeb can resolve:
- Bandwidth is expensive, and you can only purchase bandwidth blocks per server instead of a shared block for your whole pool of servers.

- Servers are required to have a public IP (really bad for backend servers) and cannot share IPs (no IP failover).

- There's no way to see if each instance you create is on a different node than your other instances. And there's no way to move an instance from one node to another. Both of these problems make Storm less suitable for a high-availability setup.

- No Windows storm instances yet.

Hopefully they can fix these 4 issues soon.

[liquidweb]

Originally Posted by Samuraid

- Servers are required to have a public IP (really bad for backend servers) and cannot share IPs (no IP failover).

We do have integrated cloud attached firewalls which can obtain the same functionality as not having a public interface. These do have security isolation and operate as a dedicated hardware firewall would.

Shared IP's have not been requested previously however this demand has been noted and is a very reasonable possibility.

- There's no way to see if each instance you create is on a different node than your other instances. And there's no way to move an instance from one node to another. Both of these problems make Storm less suitable for a high-availability setup.

Our selection algorithm is designed to never allow instances to share a node. By design Storm is a distributed cloud, multiple instances cannot be affected within an account by any level type of server failure. Beyond which we do not rely on centralized storage devices to further eliminate single points of contention and failure.

- No Windows storm instances yet.

This has been under development for some time and will be released within the coming months.

Thank you very much for your questions/input.

[Samuraid]

Originally Posted by liquidweb

Shared IP's have not been requested previously however this demand has been noted and is a very reasonable possibility.

Good to hear! Hopefully, you guys get an opportunity to implement that.

Our selection algorithm is designed to never allow instances to share a node.

I asked live chat support about this in the past, but they essentially told me "there's no way to know if two instances are on the same node. You need bare-metal storm if you want to be assured of that."
Thanks for clarifying this! I'm glad your selection algorithm allows for high-availability.

[Windows] has been under development for some time and will be released within the coming months.

Yay! Looking forward to this.

[X90H-Jake]

StormOnDemand looks like something I would like to try one of these days.

Awesome review.