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After five happy years on a dedicated box at Liquid Web, I’ve just finished up a test run on a new “cloud” environment and I must say… I’m impressed!

The new Storm service is Liquid Web’s answer to the demand for a stable, reliable cloud, without the caching and performance issues that have plagued many other attempts. Rather than setting up several web servers, several database servers, and several file servers, then patching them all together and hoping the replication-lag isn’t noticed, Storm’s approach is to create the cloud between the hardware and OS layers. I quote from the Storm site…

Storm On Demand’s stated server resources are entirely allocated to your server environment and will not be affected by the performance of other servers. 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 servers 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.

The result is cache-less goodness, root-level access to dedicated resources, and the familiar cPanel/WHM management interface (optional). In practice, the end product lives up to everything the “cloud theory” promised us in the past and offers vast improvements in responsiveness, reliability and cost-effectiveness over traditional dedicated servers.

For a full list of features and specifications, or to make the switch, check out the Storm site.

Tagged: cloud, dedicated, host, hosting, Liquid Web, server, servers, Storm, Storm On Demand