Storm on Demand – Hosting by Liquid Web

I’ve had a Storm on Demand account for about a year now, in an effort to get away from the GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated environment.  The Storm on Demand service, by Liquid Web, is a totally scalable hosting solution that can grow with you as your storage, memory, and bandwidth needs grow.

Customer Service

One of the huge benefits has been their customer service.  Any time I need help with server configuration I can just call them up.  Their techs are very knowledgable, will spend as much time as it takes to help you out, and if they don’t know the answer, they find someone who does.  I know it sounds simple, but I can’t begin to tell you the amount of disinformation I’ve received from other companies when their tech wants to hide the fact that they don’t know the answer.

Pricing

Their pricing structure is totally based on usage, and since you can scale up or down at any time, nothing goes to waste.  Storm on Demand accounts are billed by the minute, which can be useful if you need a temporary bump in bandwidth or storage. Check out their plans and pricing here.

Performance

I don’t have any benchmark data, but I can tell you that the overall speed and performance of a Storm on Demand account blows away your typical shared hosting account.

Credit Card Processing by Square

I just received my Square credit card reader yesterday – it’s pretty impressive.  For those of you who haven’t heard of Square, they are a new credit card processing company founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The Square card reader is a small device that you plug into the headset jack of your iPhone, iPad, or Android powered phone.  Coupled with the downloadable app, you can take credit card payments anywhere.  All you have to do is enter an amount, swipe the credit card through the reader, have the customer sign on your touchscreen, and the customer is sent an email receipt for the purchase.

What are the Fees?

Software: free
Card Reader: free
Setup Fee: none
Card Swiped Fees:  2.75% + 15¢
Card Keyed-In Fees: 3.5% + 15¢

Review

So far, I think it’s a pretty cool concept, and think it could be a real asset when meeting with prospective clients.  I can have them sign my contract and accept a deposit on the spot.  Although I love using the IPN features with PayPal, at least the first transaction with a customer can be a painless one.  I’ve only run a few tests on my own credit card, but I’ll update when I have some real-world experience with it.