(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Managed web host Liquid Web (www.liquidweb.com) has announced a major new feature for its Storm On Demand cloud computing platform, allowing users to provision and manage private dedicated servers with powerful cloud hosting features.
According to Liquid Web’s Tuesday announcement, Storm Bare Metal provides all the cloud hosting features users love about Storm Servers like instant server setup, clone, resize, backups and Cloud Attached Firewalls, but rather than being delivered on shared resources, it’s delivered on a private dedicated server. It also gives users complete hardware transparency, enabling them to specify the exact processor, memory and hard drive configuration for the job.
With Storm On Demand, users can deploy flexible, hybrid hosting configurations that contain a mixture of Storm Cloud Servers and Storm Bare Metal dedicated servers within the same management console. Also, the move between Storm Cloud Servers and Storm Bare Metal Dedicated Servers can be performed with the click of a button, so if a customer is getting overloaded, an individual can quickly scale up their infrastructure without any migration pains.
Storm Bare Metal Dedicated Server offerings start at the low end with an Intel Pentium E5300 with one 2600 MHz CPU, 1.9GB of RAM, and 220GB of SATA storage for $90 per month or $0.12 per computing hour. On the high end, Storm offers an AMD Opteron 2350 with two 2000 MHz CPUs with eight cores combined, 32 GB of RAM, and four 1,853GB hard drives in a RAID 10 configuration, all for $500 per month or $0.69 per hour.
One interesting Storm client is author and comedian John Hodgman, who has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and as “a PC” in Apple’s “Get a Mac” advertising campaign. For his website, areasofmyexpertise.com (www.areasofmyexpertise.com), he needed a hosting platform capable of handling massive spikes in traffic. After having problems with traditional hosting, John moved his website to the Storm On Demand cloud, and it has ran flawlessly ever since.
“Having crashed my own website repeatedly while linking to it Twitter-phonically,[sic] I experimented with new Internet technology to try to fix this problem,” Hodgman said. “This experiment was successful. I am using Storm On Demand… and I will continue to use and enjoy it.”
