Storm on Demand

Until about six months ago I had not heard of Storm on Demand.  But they are a lot cheaper than even Rackspace, and their SSD Drive Servers are amazing!

Pros:

• Easy to use and intuitive interface
• Great selection of VM’s up to 32 Cores and 96GB
• Great customer service
• Great Prices
• SSD Drive Servers are amazing – blindingly fast and reliable

Cons:

• Creating new VM’s can be very slow (although not so much with the SSD drives)
• Resizing VM’s is also often slow (although not so much with the SSD drives)
• Backups don’t always work

Because of the speed and reliablity of their SSD Drive Servers I expect to move 90% of our clients to these servers.  It is redonkulous how good they are!

The Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace was my early favorite although in the last six months that has changed.

Pros:

• Easy to use and intuitive interface
• Tiny VM choices down to 256MB
• Good customer service
• Good Prices

Cons:

• Resizing VM’s is slow
• Backups don’t always work
• Slightly buggy VM interface
• No extra disk options at all, everything is in lockstep with RAM
• Limited choice of high-end servers (cores/RAM)

Amazon Web Services

After working in the cloud for about two years I have a number of thoughts about some key vendors. Each vendor is different and there is no outright winner.

Here goes for Amazon:

Pros:

• Most advanced set of Cloud features in the industry
• Largest choice of RAM, Core, and Disk options
• Most flexibile hard disk solution (EBS)
• Pre-pay gives generous discounts (41%+)
• Fastest instance resize solution
• The one to beat

Cons:

• Zero free customer service
• Poor paid customer service
• They are still over priced
• A number of big outages over the last couple of years