The night before I left to travel for the holidays, I was very excited to receive my beta invite for Liquidweb’s new cloud hosting platform, Storm on Demand. I have been in the beta invite queue since Liquidweb first announced this new venture. To say the least, my excitement has not yet been let down.

Since I first signed up, I’ve been able to play with everything and the best way I can describe it is it’s a mix between Rackspace cloud and Amazon EC2. Liquidweb strongly pushes their support and service as does Rackspace and also include a backup feature but have also taken note on VPS’s CPU and memory and bandwidth pricing from Amazon. Then of course, they have thrown a few features of their own in too.

These are some of the features I’ve run into so far:

  • Instance Backups
    These are entire images of your Xen VPS. You can pay for backup space by the GB at $0.10/gb a month, or you can buy bulk backup space sort of like Amazon’s EBS starting at $10/mo for 100gb. Backups are executed daily and you can retain up to a maximum of 90 days of backups.
  • Extra Instance Addons
    Storm on demand offers managed hosting for your virtual servers as well as CPanel and Fantastico pre-installed on your server.
  • Ability to scale up
    This is something I think Rackspace got right and where Amazon is lacking. Sometimes you just need more memory or more CPU to a single instance. Scaling out is usually the right thing to do, but for small to medium sized deployments, that just adds extra headache.
  • Easily create custom server images
    This can all be done through the management console very easily and quickly. You can also launch a new from your saved image. Pricing for storing server images is $0.15/per gb per mo
  • Firewall
    Like Amazon’s EC2, you can create your own  firewall settings and apply them to each instance and have multiple different sets of firewall rules etc. This takes one less hassle out of setting up a new instance and dealing with iptables accross multiple instances.
  • Virtual Networks
    I really like what Storm did here with the networking. It allows you to create virtual networks between instances. This is pretty useful because you can isolate different machines. On Rackspace cloud and EC2 (though I guess you can isolate them with VPC, but that is more of a VPN product), basically all the instances on your account are networked together.
  • Better pricing for large instances
    This is where I think Storm on Demand is a great value. Hardware is getting dirt cheap, and the whole point of having your server in the cloud is to cut costs. I think the huge value here starts at the 8gb instances for $200/mo. On Rackspace this same setup costs $350/mo and on EC2 is costs $248.20/mo (standard on-demand).

When a instance is created it basically is assigned certain number of CPU’s based on the size of the instance. Each virtual CPU is a 2.2ghz Xeon. They don’t advertise this on the Storm on Demand front page, but is displayed when you create a new instance. 2gb instance has 1 VCPU, 4gb 2 VCPU’s, 8gb 4 VCPU’s, 16gb 4 VCPU’s, 32gb 8 VCPU’s.

The control panel is very slick and responsive.

No host is perfect, so I want to talk about some of the downsides I’ve run into so far.

Major Issues:

  1. No API
    Seeing as this isn’t even available to the public yet, it’s not really a big deal. The API is actually done but is in testing now and will probably be released in a couple weeks.
  2. No full DNS
    There is some sort of sudo DNS. All it seems to do is create an A record pointing to your instance IP. What about subdomains or MX records or CNAME records I possibly need for my apps and/or customers? This is something I really like about Rackspace’s cloud is that they give you full DNS support that you can do anything you want with.
  3. Weird/confusing billing
    They state that all charges are hourly and “Any terminated services are charged only for the time they were active.” but on the bottom when you create a instance they state “Payment due today, for service now through 2010-01-15″. I think they charge you a pro-rated usage for the rest of the month because I have a $38 charge on my credit card from Liquidweb from what I’m assuming was from the first test instance I created. They charged me $38 but when those resources were canceled and weren’t used up, my account was credited the $38 for future usage. I have no idea why on earth they would decide to do something like this. It basically is false advertising with all their “pay as you go” stuff, when it’s clearly not pay as you go. I should be charged at the end of each month for resources used during that month.

Minor things:

  1. Only 64-bit images
    You don’t really need 64-bit support unless you need > 4gb ram. Using 64-bit libraries also uses up a bit more memory. While this isn’t a deal breaker because you can install 32-bit libraries with ease, I would just like to see some other choices out there.
  2. Instance names require a fully qualified domain name
    You can’t just name your instances one word, it has to be a full domain

Overall impression

I’m always excited to see new hosting technologies come out and see what competitors come up with next. I think Storm’s big advantages are their price’s of larger instances and the ease of use of some key features such as backups and creating server images. I’m also excited to see what their API is going to look like. My biggest peeve of Storm so far is why I was billed $38 for something that I’m suppose to pay for only what I use by the hour.