Michigan-Based Web Hosting Company Launches New Cloud Hosting Product

"Storm On Demand" Will Benefit Thousands of Businesses across the World, Create 600 New High Tech Jobs in Michigan

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Jan 11, 2010, 06:15 ET

LANSING, Mich., Jan. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Liquid Web Inc., a Lansing-based Web hosting company with more than 20,000 clients in more than 120 countries, today launched Storm On Demand, a flexible cloud hosting platform that can benefit any business that has or needs a computer server.

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Storm on Demand's unparalleled ease of use augmented by Liquid Web's industry-leading customer support will help differentiate the product, company executives said.

"Virtually every business or anyone with a personal Web site can benefit from Storm On Demand," said Liquid Web founder and CEO Matthew Hill. "Cloud hosting is revolutionizing computer server deployment, migration and cloning. Storm clients will enjoy its intuitive and responsive interface, speed and flexibility, and the superior customer support that we are well known for here at Liquid Web."

Liquid Web Director of Marketing Travis Stoliker said Storm On Demand is a cost-effective, secure, easy to use, and fast solution for any company that wants to deploy a server, replace a server, clone a server, or simply increase server capacity.

"Cloud hosting and cloud computing are technology advances that make it easier and less expensive for clients to deploy, migrate, backup, and scale their server in near real time with the click of a mouse," Stoliker said. "This will be a significant advance for Liquid Web, our clients and for the State of Michigan, which is working hard to move its economy from smokestacks and assembly lines to advanced computing technologies and fiber lines."

Storm On Demand is being launched after nearly two years of product development by Liquid Web engineers and private beta testing by Liquid Web clients.

In November, Liquid Web opened a new $80 million, 90,000 square-foot data center in Lansing to support the launch and deployment of Storm On Demand. The company is in the process of hiring 600 new employees to service clients from the data center over the next five years. Already because of Storm on Demand, 38 new jobs have been created over the past three months at Liquid Web, which also operates two other data centers in the Lansing area with 150 employees. The three data centers will hold 35,000 computer servers that host the Web sites of clients across the world.

Cloud-computing is an application that has been taking IT and the technology sector by storm. The term "cloud" is translated loosely to mean "the Internet." "Hosting on the cloud" means resources from several servers are pooled together to power a Web site or application. Cloud hosting is attractive to many IT professionals because products such as Storm On Demand allow easy scaling up and down for various levels of Web traffic. Storm customers will only pay for the amount of server space they use, much like any company or home pays only for the amount of electricity or water consumed. Storm also has the remarkable ability to "clone" entire servers in minutes and to test changes to Web sites before they are launched and activated.

Other companies offer Web hosting services via "the cloud," including Internet giant Amazon.com. Its subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, offers a collection of cloud-platform Web services.

Because so many companies have computer servers, the number of companies seeking cloud hosting services is growing at a strong pace. Even the White House is looking to the cloud to cut IT costs. The Obama administration announced in September 2009 a long-term cloud-computing policy intended to cut costs on infrastructure and reduce the environmental impact of U.S. government computing systems.

To learn more about the cloud-hosting platform Storm, visit www.StormOnDemand.com.

NOTE TO MEDIA: If you are a technical writer or blogger and you'd like a free account to try Storm, contact Monica Fineis at [email protected].

Related Links

www.StormOnDemand.com

www.LiquidWeb.com

SOURCE Liquid Web Inc.