Uptime & Reliability

Little information on reliability available

GMO Cloud advertises top-notch data centers located in San Jose, California, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Tokyo, Japan.  Unlike discount providers, the company’s website is not plastered with “99% uptime” guarantees; rather, it seems that GMO Cloud offers their reputation and awareness of customers’ business needs as a part of an operating partnership. While part of this may be cultural, it certainly seems like downtime should be of minimal, if any concern.

With access to data centers in Japan, Asia, and the US, multi-national companies can use the services closest to their physical presence while maintaining their global network.

Features

Good overall services with lots of options

GMO Cloud is a business-to-business (B2B) operation and appears to be focused on virtual server, dedicated server, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) operations rather than discount consumer web hosting. As a result, it is clear that GMO Cloud is a focused company with many different types of assistance available to customers.

One very attractive feature is a “pay as you go” pricing structure for IaaS services, with a fee for actual CPU utilization and a smaller maintenance charge when the customer is not using any services. This idea seems to be gaining popularity and can offer companies the ability to use much more powerful servers on-demand without the considerable expense of operating their own data center or leasing or purchasing dedicated hardware and software.

Another offering is that GMO Cloud provides what they term “object storage” and charges per gigabyte for disk space and internet access for activity from the cloud server; no fee is charged for connecting to the server for the first gigabyte of access. The advantage of object storage is that it can be used exclusively or as an expansion of existing space.  Again, the ability to have this type of service without substantial investment and subsequent risks can hardly be overstated for non-IT companies who simply want to own not much more than their desktop PC’s and an ISP to operate their business.

GMO Cloud offers current hardware with a variety of options, allowing customers with minimal needs as well as high-end requirements pick and choose exactly what they want, with clearly stated allowances along with a generous menu of add-on services to supplement their configuration.

For cloud services, account set-up starts with a choice of service selection, with a number of selections that reflect frequent customer needs. For virtual or dedicated server products, a list of specifications are listed to allow customers to choose, for example, their disk space which ranges from 512 MB to 2 TB, with CPU power and available RAM being part of the set up process.

Support

Good technical service available when you need it

GMO Cloud offers phone, web ticketing and FAQ pages to address customer incidents and service requests.  New servers have a 5-day standard provisioning rate with emergency services available.  All data centers are staffed 24/7/365 to provide hands-on support and repair.

Pricing

Expensive but you get what you pay for

With such a diverse array of products comes a wide range of prices.  A “mini server” with 512 MB RAM, 20 GB of disk space and a 2 Ghz CPU is offered at ¥540.00 ($ 4.50 USD) monthly.

Object storage is listed at ¥7.78 ($0.15) per GB per month.  These figures are returned by Google’s currency and language conversion services and a formal request to GMO Cloud would confirm actual charges.

Summary

Good hosting partner

GMO Cloud appears to be rock-solid and provides a true partnership with just about any size enterprise. With the number of services and options available, their ownership of the top share of their markets looks to be well-earned.

Pros:

• High-end facilities and operations
• Custom configuration and consulting available

Cons:

• Prices are fair, but still high for smaller companies
• Services are often overly complex