Comments on: The Truth About Storm On Demand

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:28:29 +0000

I just found this out myself. I was preparing for launch in earlier spring and just asked about that ‘spike’ process and was told unlike say RackSpace CloudSite it is not automaticaly provisioned/scaled, that it requires both manual monitoring, intervenion and reboot.

I love Storm/Liquid web for their customer service which I think is unparalleled but this is not true cloud service as I understand it.

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:14:47 +0000

Interesting, could you do a short blog about why you moved, what happened? and may be a few words on SolarVPS?

I believe a lot of surfers are still using your review as guidelines, ( Since it is the first few to come up with google )

By: Ad Hustler

Ad Hustler — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:57:00 +0000

I became unhappy with storm on demand and moved what was hosted there to SolarVPS

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:47:23 +0000

This is one of the few, rare reviews on StormOnDemand.

It would be nice if you could do a review follow up, they have recently reduce their price on transfer, and i think they have new API for scheduling and Auto Expand etc.

By: chaos1

chaos1 — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:10:25 +0000

I have been using Storm On Demand since September 2010 on the 2GB package. What can I say? Deals! Substantial load times since we moved our major sites off our previous dedicated server with LiquidWeb. We are now running a network of 154 sites on a SoD instance. Today we decided to scale it to 4GB package. The last week we’ve been hitting the ceiling and dipping into swap.

After looking at dashboard statistics, web stats, analytics, optimizing our databases and our load times we’re happy to see the growth. May 2011, we received 474,288 page requests on our major site, excluding a couple other cPanels that were brought onto the storm server 2 weeks ago.

I must say, we’ve hit OOM errors in the last week. We optimized Apache, MySQL and looked into what we could do for caching. We may potentially spend more time in the back end (v.s. optimizing our theme load times). Now that page_speed is stable, we might start poking LW techs to see what there opinion of it is. I’d love to implement page_speed in the near future. Has anyone fired it up on their instance yet?

Thanks Op for this write up! I found this post while Googling around looking for others experience with SoD. You should update this with 2011 edits!

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 19:22:29 +0000

I’ve been a Storm user for about 5 months. Many of the items noted above are 100% accurate ie: downtime for resizing etc. Be prepared for when you start up and are configuring your instance, they will likely block your ip, and you will have to contact tech support to whitelist it.

Yesterday I discovered a big problem, when according to the Storm proprietary panel my instance used 6TB (yes that’s right) of bandwidth in ONE WEEK, adding about $800 to my bill. Check WHM and Bandmin, and according to those my bandwidth was in normal range (about 350 GB, and well within my package of 500GB)

Needless to say I flipped. After tech support passed me to sales, and sales passed me back to tech support, I’m told sales would handle it, and I would hear from them today.

But of course I am very concerned. I was literally about to pull the trigger on a new instance (trying their new cloud/dedicated hybrid bare metal server), but now I am worried.

Running the servers is just ONE part of my job (unfortunately), and Storm does make it easier. However, when your on the bleeding edge of technology, be prepared to bleed a little, and I am certain it will get better over time. No technology is perfect, especially new ones, and this developments in cloud computing certainly offer a great benefit to overworked/underpaid geeks like me.

By: Dude

Dude — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:33:07 +0000

Another con with VPS is that you are still sharing resources with others on the base system. One place where you can really take a hit is disk I/O if you have an app with lots of traffic which hits the database (WordPress.) For most people, the DB will be the bottleneck, if you are running a VPS then this bottleneck is worse. The bare metal servers are also using XEN software (same as their VPS plans) but the difference is the bare metals have only you on one server. Though you aren’t sharing resources, you might still be taking a hit on overhead. I’m not sure how the I/O compares between the two plans, but if the above issues are a concern for you, then you might as well go with a traditional dedicated server.

By: Jon L.

Jon L. — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:51:37 +0000

I concur with Vu about Rackspace vs Storm. Rackspace works well for my private server (512mb instance), and is cheaper than Storm could go (I pay <$30/mo at Rackspace), but if I ever size up, it'll be to Storm.

For my employer, we're actually starting to transition from SoftLayer to Storm, as SoftLayer's cloud performance is abysmal and more expensive than Storm.

By: Vu

Vu — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:23:32 +0000

I worked with rackspace cloud server for the past 5 months. They have overing under $0.07. I have a few server instances with them and I up size and down size daily.

The cloud control back end is very slow. Online they don’t have live detail of all the sizes that I switch and their charges. I have to keep track of that myself to make sure they are charging me correctly.

Also, I’ve had instances were I go up size and cannot down size, so they are raked up the charges for that. I had to do a ticket to get help down sizing. I got stuck with up size and cannot downsize for over 3 days and still not had anyone responsed to my ticket. The chat help was clueless.

I did some research on the prices, rackspace is over 2.5 more pricier than storm on demand on comparable plans.

I am planning to move my production instances to Storm to get more juice for the money. I keep my development boxes on rackspace because I can keep them at the 256MB plan when I don’t work on them.

By: Jon L.

Jon L. — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 18:00:47 +0000

Just an FYI, Storm now has an API in BETA. They signed me up for it just this week, so resizing should be possible via the API now (cron job, or monitored performance, etc)