Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : Yet, another StormOnDemand thread

[coume]

Hi all,

Following my recent issues with PE, I am strongly considering moving onto a Cloud. I shortlisted Rackspace and Storm.

Looking at other threads, it looks like I am not the only one struggling to get technical info from their online chat.

Asking about CPU speed, I did not get a single answer. I was told that if I was mainly interested in CPUs, I should look at their other offering. I asked if I could therefore end up on a 500MHz one and was after a while told, that they were usually above 2GHz. I appreciate that a definitive answer cannot be provided but having to fight for a range of speed/type (i.e.: 2.00 to 3.00GHz.) is not reassuring.

I now tried to obtain info about the kind of HDD used and the kind of RAID used. I just want to know if they use 7.2k HDD or the more reliable 15k ones. I was also curious to know about the RAID, etc. and my answer was "The hardware used on the Storm on Demand instances is propriitary so I cannot provide additional specifics" before "give me just a moment" and no further reply.

I read many very satisfied users of Liquidweb and they have been on my shortlist for a long time (when I was looking at VPS before, etc.) but having to fight for getting information if making me wonder if Rackspace is not the best solution

Thanks
Ludo

[LiquidWebTravis]

Originally Posted by coume

Hi all,

Following my recent issues with PE, I am strongly considering moving onto a Cloud. I shortlisted Rackspace and Storm.

Looking at other threads, it looks like I am not the only one struggling to get technical info from their online chat.

Asking about CPU speed, I did not get a single answer. I was told that if I was mainly interested in CPUs, I should look at their other offering. I asked if I could therefore end up on a 500MHz one and was after a while told, that they were usually above 2GHz. I appreciate that a definitive answer cannot be provided but having to fight for a range of speed/type (i.e.: 2.00 to 3.00GHz.) is not reassuring.

I now tried to obtain info about the kind of HDD used and the kind of RAID used. I just want to know if they use 7.2k HDD or the more reliable 15k ones. I was also curious to know about the RAID, etc. and my answer was "The hardware used on the Storm on Demand instances is propriitary so I cannot provide additional specifics" before "give me just a moment" and no further reply.

I read many very satisfied users of Liquidweb and they have been on my shortlist for a long time (when I was looking at VPS before, etc.) but having to fight for getting information if making me wonder if Rackspace is not the best solution

Thanks
Ludo

The underlying hardware of StormOnDemand can have slight variations due to the fact that this is a virualized product which uses multiple hardware platforms and multiple instance sizes. I can tell you that the hardware profile for the smallest StormOnDemand instance size (2GB Ram) is built with a minimum processor of Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400. Please remember that you get a FULL processing core. Here is a section from our FAQ:

"Storm On Demand's stated server resources are entirely allocated to your server environment and will not be affected by the performance of other server instances. Storm On Demand CPU's represent a full physical processor core and are not shared with any other users. The distributed nature of our cloud architecture allows you to rely on the performance of your instances to be consistent and in line with what you would see with a physical dedicated server.

Unlike other cloud hosting providers, Storm On Demand does NOT utilize bursting shared resources or centralized storage which can have a significant negative performance impact for others utilizing the same resources. This helps ensure that Storm On Demand customers will always be guaranteed the performance that they requested from their server and will always get their full value."

In relation to hardware all Storm On Demand hard drives are Raid protected. If you have any further questions please let me know. Thank you.

[cloudharmony]

Rackspace Cloud takes a slightly different approach than Storm. They give you 4 cores with your cloud server but it is shared not dedicated like storm. CPU architecture for our Rackspace Cloud server is AMD Opteron 2350 HE. We've run geekbench performance benchmarks on both and Storm came out slightly ahead with 3105 vs 2721 with Rackspace.