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Mosso.com - Information Thread




Posted by keith70, 03-04-2006, 02:29 PM
I started this Topic to discuss the new www.mosso.com hosting platform. Goodpoints: 80GB of webspace 2000GB of bandwidth Rackspace.com - backed. Can provide support for our customers. Can provide billing. 100% SLA Windows and Linux hosting. 24x7 True Human USA support. Badpoints: Control panel does not offer a lot of features. Dont offer dedicated IP's Dont offer SSL Dont offer private name servers. Please post your good points and bad points, and I will keep updating this thread.
Posted by layer0, 03-04-2006, 07:08 PM
My personal opinion is that it is a very good concept and perfect for web designers that don't want to have to worry about the hosting portion of their services, but I doubt this product offering is enticing to the general reseller market as private name servers, etc. like you said are not available. They also have a proprietary control panel which isn't that good due to the fact that most prospective customers are used to cPanel or other popular control panels. All in all, Mosso is a great idea but it only attracts a small portion of a huge market.
Posted by JordanSS, 03-04-2006, 07:45 PM
elix... I believe that the webdesigners will not be very pleased to spend 100$ every month when they can have the same service with less. Mosso would be great if they had cPanel or Plesk (I preffer cPanel) ssl and private name servers. Without that I do not believe I would sign with them. It is very interesting to see how this is going as they might become a VERY important player in the market (RACKSPACE is a big plus for them).
Posted by MyDigitalHost, 03-05-2006, 09:43 AM
I for one am very intriqued by Mosso's offerings. What stands out particularly is their toll-free phone and chat support for my clients ($3/month per client) and billing for my clients ($2 per client or 4%). I've spent some time on chat with Mosso to ask more about thier offerings. It is a proprietary control panel. As of right now, you don't have access to a "file manager" like you do with cPanel. There is no automatic signup for clients. You have to enter your clients manually for billing. You're still in a "shared" environment, so unlike VPS, you're not guaranteed ram or cpu usage. They'll cut off your site like others will if you get temporary spikes in traffic that affect the other mosso clients. The person I was in chat with did say that a file manager was in the works and would be offered soon. All that being said, I think that if they up the offerings with their control panel, to at least have the same functionality as cPanel or Plesk, then they will be a major contender for my reseller business..
Posted by mrzippy, 03-05-2006, 10:13 AM
We currently pay about $800/month for a clustered server solution directly from rackspace. And now, according to mosso.com, we can get it for $100 month. That's pretty amazing. I received an email response saying that private nameservers are going to be offered eventually... but they don't know if there is demand for it. So if you all (if you want this feature) could email them and ask for it.. they'll more likely implement it sooner. Personally, I think the infrastructure they have setup is amazing. Redundant everything, clustering, etc... it seems like a pretty good setup for "high end" hosting. The only thing that is unbelievable is the price. I don't know how they can do it for that little. I think I read somewhere they have a 60 second guarantee response for chat or phone, if you also purchase their support service... If they can pull this off, then I think they'll be a major contender in the high-end reseller market space.
Posted by keith70, 03-05-2006, 10:19 AM
mrzippy...your right on everything you said. botchka, you said "they'll cut off your site", I asked about this and they said they would not cut off your site, hence the 100% SLA. jordanss, where can you get this type of service for much less?
Posted by mrzippy, 03-05-2006, 10:27 AM
Do you know this for fact, or are you just guessing? The sales agent I spoke with claimed they have some customers who have active forums with a million hits/day, and no problems. I specifically asked what they would do if a website "we" were hosting went crazy with traffic or cpu usage, and they said they would simply move the site to a new server if needed, and then let us know about the move. If anyone has a different answer (ie: more then just your opinion), please feel free to post it.
Posted by mrzippy, 03-05-2006, 10:29 AM
Please name one company that offers the same infrastructure for less then $100/month.
Posted by layer0, 03-05-2006, 10:34 AM
Mosso cannot be run on cPanel or Plesk. cPanel and Plesk is built to have one-server setups with everything running on that system. Mosso has seperate CLUSTERS to run one software - such as PHP, ASP, etc. I have a pretty good idea of how they are doing this and I do find it to be quite a reliable setup. As mrzippy stated, there is not another company that can offer a fully clustered environment on a 100% SLA for $100/month - you will not be able to find that. Also look at the space-bandwidth : price ratio. You get a dedicated server's resources (if not more) at $100/month which sounds just about right. Mosso is a GREAT idea, but it is NOT for the WHT crowd - most of the people here are in search for cPanel, Plesk, etc. But, the true market lies outside WHT. This is what Mosso is targetting and they definitely will appear as an eniticing choice for a reseller solution to that outside-WHT market. Just my 2 cents.
Posted by MyDigitalHost, 03-05-2006, 10:50 AM
I don't normally just blindly offer my opinion on subjects like this since it could tarnish a companies reputation. That being said, I spoke to "Phil" yesterday and specifically asked him if my site saw a temporary spike in traffic, like from the digg effect, what they would do. He specifically mentioned that if it affected other clients, they would cut my site off and talk to me about it. He never mentioned that they had clients that had forums with millions of hits per day with no problems.
Posted by layer0, 03-05-2006, 10:51 AM
What they said is a pretty standard practice amongst hosts, but if their cluster is really what they describe I doubt a site getting digged would affect the *overall* performance.
Posted by DevelopAl, 03-05-2006, 12:35 PM
Instead of site cut-offs I would be more interested in their spamming/phishing policies. If one of my customers has unsecure phpbb and gets hacked, and is phishing will they shut off his account or all of my customers? Same with spamming, etc. Will they handle it on a domain by domain basis or all clients pay for one? That would be my biggest concern. I will contact them about this when I am ready to sign up, but the truth is they can say one thing and do another when faced with a problem.
Posted by MyDigitalHost, 03-05-2006, 12:57 PM
I had actually spoken to mosso and was only offering up what they told me. No they didn't specifically say that it was a shared environment (it is). When I asked my question about high temporary traffic, it was never offered up that they have clients now that get "a million hits/day, and no problems". I was worried about my current sites because they sometimes get on digg and my current host just cuts off the site because they think it's a ddos attack. Frankly, I don't appreciate the implication that I offered up nothing more than my opinion or guess, but thank you for the "permission" to post here if I don't offer up an opinion next time... Last edited by MyDigitalHost; 03-05-2006 at 01:02 PM.
Posted by reiteration, 03-05-2006, 01:25 PM
Last time I looked rackspace was sitting on 99.846% network uptime so I take the 100% SLA with a pinch of salt. We offered a similar service over a year ago but people didn't seem that interested. After all its still a shared system that you have little or no control over, but for resellers who don't need this then it seems to be a good offer. Why don't they tell you how many servers are in the cluster ? Unlimited MySQL is NOT possible. More info needed on SLA - what compensation is payed if they fail 100% ? I must say though its a very nice looking site :-) John
Posted by tsotodeh, 03-05-2006, 08:41 PM
The only disappointing featuer is the CP It's not Userfrendly... Althought its not important for some users, NLB and clustering is more important and The price is some thing unbelievable
Posted by Aussie Bob, 03-06-2006, 03:25 AM
I don't think you'd get the same performance from their $100/mth shared environment, as compared to your $800/mth dedicated cluster. There has to be a performance drop, the higher you push things, but when you'd hit that ceiling, is another thing.
Posted by premium20, 03-06-2006, 06:41 AM
Yes, so true !!! I am hoping to see some real feedback or reviews on them soon.
Posted by keith70, 03-06-2006, 07:33 PM
We have signed up. We will be doing extensive testing for the next two months. I was told today SSL is being worked on.
Posted by Zeal Web Hosting, 03-06-2006, 09:04 PM
Hi Keith, do you think you could contact via MSN. Thank you Last edited by Odd Fact; 04-15-2007 at 08:13 PM.
Posted by cphaynes, 03-06-2006, 11:28 PM
They don't offer Zend or ionCube with their PHP installations. Becareful when checking these guys out, as many large PHP packages (like forums, help desks, etc.) require Zend or ionCube. Mosso seems pretty kick-A regardless.
Posted by mrzippy, 03-07-2006, 03:49 AM
Couldn't use use either one of these with the "runtime" loaders instead?
Posted by layer0, 03-07-2006, 08:17 AM
That should work just fine...though it is more convenient to have it installed server-wide, I actually don't see why they don't. If anything they should take the Zend Performance Suite..
Posted by Zeal Web Hosting, 03-07-2006, 05:31 PM
What features does there control panel lack?
Posted by mrzippy, 03-07-2006, 05:42 PM
Pretty much everything except: - email accounts and forwarding - mysql databases (although there is no phpmyadmin) - basic stats
Posted by cphaynes, 03-07-2006, 05:44 PM
I stand corrected. They do infact support Zend on their PHP install, but they don't have ionCube. As far as their panel, I cannot tell you what it lacks b/c I'm not a customer (yet). They don't offer SSL's or custom Nameservers yet either, but I have been assured those are the next 2 things to be installed.
Posted by peteysa, 03-07-2006, 06:25 PM
How did you figure the the uptime %? Thanks! Dan
Posted by mrzippy, 03-07-2006, 06:30 PM
According to their sales people (I've asked 3 different people now), they have no ceiling. If your site does a million hits/minute, they say they'll be able to handle it. Doesn't make sense to me.. but I don't understand how they're doing their load-balancing.. so who knows?
Posted by Infinix, 03-07-2006, 07:01 PM
According to their page: "Mosso is a venture company of Rackspace Managed Hosting." So I guess they have plenty to back up their promises with. Definitely an up and coming player in the high end hosting market. Given the resources (people as well as money) they have access to I expect they'll have their CP issues sorted out in no time.
Posted by keith70, 03-07-2006, 07:08 PM
jsaniuk - I am out of town returning tomorrow, where are you located?
Posted by GT.Eugene, 03-08-2006, 12:43 AM
No SSH is available for mosso. Members might want to clarify this http://www.mosso.com/servercompare.jsp, and have keith70 to add it to his post.
Posted by tsotodeh, 03-08-2006, 01:01 AM
who told you that? I ask phil about the SSL and here is the answer: Phil: I am not sure were he got that news, but SSL is still not a active feature at this time. Any large changes like that we would post to our website
Posted by Zeal Web Hosting, 03-08-2006, 01:05 AM
Did you ask him if they had it? They don't yet... SSL is their first thing on their to do list which should be implemented soon and then private nameservers. It is not an active feature at this time, like Phil said, and when it does become an active feature it will be posted on the website. He said it was being worked on and it is.
Posted by cphaynes, 03-08-2006, 10:30 AM
I've heard now from 3 different people over their "live chat" that SSL and Private NS' are a top priority and should be out "soon". I was assured by one guy that those 2 features are of the utmost importance to them.
Posted by MyDigitalHost, 03-08-2006, 10:37 AM
Incidentally, I asked for, and received, a logon to a demo of their "control panel". For those of us used to cPanel, it's VERY lacking. There is no File Manager. Websites can only be uploaded via FTP. There is no automation (as best as I can tell ) for account signup. I'm not talking about account creation on the server. I'm talking about signup. Every customer of yours has to be entered in manually. Their mailing address, billing info, name, etc. No SSL. No SSH. After I've had a chance to check it out more, I will report more. As of now, I think that the service has HUGE potential, but it's proprietary control panel, leaves a lot to be desired. Greg EDITED TO ADD: No manual backup process from control panel (as near as I can tell). No stats other than bandwidth and disk space. No error logs. No cron jobs. Last edited by MyDigitalHost; 03-08-2006 at 10:41 AM.
Posted by keith70, 03-08-2006, 11:59 AM
tsotodeh: I didnt say it was SSL ready now, I said they are working on it. Webmail is squirrelmail with nutsmail theme. Stats is Webalizer. Zend is supported. Cron jobs was told they are working on possibley adding this feature. Sometime over the weekend, I will have the 1st topic here "edited" with the other knonws now for Mosso.com. Last edited by keith70; 03-08-2006 at 12:11 PM.
Posted by tsotodeh, 03-08-2006, 12:35 PM
I thought you said begin to work!
Posted by Rochen, 03-08-2006, 02:53 PM
Yeah, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either. Are they trying to say that someone like iNET could move from their $20k per month Rackspace hosting setup over to a $100 per month plan with Mosso? It just doesn’t add up to me. If this is indeed true though, then I think they could be in for a rude awakening in terms of revenue to their Rackspace division being hit pretty hard. - Chris
Posted by DevelopAl, 03-09-2006, 01:42 AM
I think they are after a much different target. I get they feeling they are after the typical Web Designer who wants to setup his clients in a reliable hosting solution. I would do this hands down. I can easily charge $50-$100 per customer with that kind of reliability and support.
Posted by Aussie Bob, 03-09-2006, 06:42 AM
I can't see them cutting into that marketspace much. Someone like inet has a very complex and custom hosting setup, and they can't replicate that in a mass shared environment, no matter how clustered and redundant that shared platform is. Mosso's offerring is powerful, but I can't see it suited to the reseller marketspace now. Hosts also like to use reseller accounts as a stepping stone on the path to their own servers, be that rented or coloed, so the Mosso platform would only serve for a limited time. Also they use an in-house control panel that would not be migration friendly going out or coming in. But they do have an incredible offering, none the less. No doubt like rackspace, they'll carve out a niche for themselves, and establish themselves as a player in the market. Last edited by Aussie Bob; 03-09-2006 at 06:56 AM.
Posted by Aussie Bob, 03-09-2006, 06:55 AM
Yes, I think you're right.
Posted by mrzippy, 03-09-2006, 07:53 AM
I agree, that their market is for the typical Web Designer who just wants very high reliability for their own clients. I don't think the "reseller market" (as known around here) is their target market at all.
Posted by hostinganddesign, 03-09-2006, 12:20 PM
I was a beta tester for mosso for more than 2 months. Many of your comments about limited functionality in their control panel is correct. I believe they are targeting web designers. I have found it too limiting as other beta testers complained of non-standard configurations because of the clustering. It's not nearly as robust as a 20.00/mo. reseller account. Uptime, billing, and support sounds really good but I couldn't tell if they offshored the support work. Just my 2.
Posted by Zeal Web Hosting, 03-09-2006, 05:03 PM
All of their support is located in one office in the US. All the sales support for them and the techs and the dev's are all beside each other. There support is really really good, you always get a response in less then 60 seconds with the live chat also.
Posted by DevelopAl, 03-09-2006, 08:44 PM
Considering they opened on 3/1/06 I would expect they are overstaffed at this point and I would expect a 60 second response. Let's wait and see if they pull it through the longhaul. I am waiting for them to finish SSL, and I am sold.
Posted by Packet, 03-12-2006, 08:43 AM
From a Redundancy point of view and keeping a customers website "online" I think its a fantastic idea. The billing would be a big plus to me, as well as the billing system it seems to feature (wont have my account setup till monday so I have not seen it only from the screen shots) The support is also a huge plus for many people, then again I personally wouldnt outsource my companys support, as I feel my clients should deal with my company. The control panel is a little bit of a draw back cpanel or plesk with be really great. SSL customers must be able to have ssl certs. To be honest, this seems like the first release of many. Will these guys shake up the Reseller Market?
Posted by Zeal Web Hosting, 03-12-2006, 08:45 AM
They are releasing SSL and private nameservers very soon and will be making updates all the time. Adding features to the cp also. Things will only get better from here! I am personaly very excited and am a big fan!
Posted by apex13, 03-14-2006, 08:38 AM
Damn, they beat me to the punch ... Ah well, different customer base.
Posted by tsotodeh, 03-14-2006, 10:54 AM
what happened?
Posted by 01globalnet, 03-15-2006, 10:31 AM
The whole setup seems awesome! I will be waiting till they add more and more features (ssl, priv nameservers, probably more email add ons, phpmyadmin, crons etc..). Especially cron jobs is required to automate offsite backups - I cannot imagine I will do manually backups every day of my clients' sites! Do you know if the plans are offered at Rackspace's UK datacenter? That would be great !! As of the price : it is really excellent, you can not find anywhere 80gig space for 100$ !! I also wonder if they could offer smaller plans like 20gig for $40 let's say for smaller designers and testing.
Posted by sallyanne, 03-15-2006, 02:00 PM
Please wait for a site operator to respond. You are now chatting with 'Mike' you: Hi Mike Mike: Welcome to Mosso! you: Moss looks good, but do you have detailed specifications of the hosting features? Mike: How are you? Mike: I have some - it depends upon what specifically you're looking for... you: Need to know all the technical specs which can be included in client accounts Mike: We don't have a laundry list of what's in the client account - it's basically the same as your main account, minus the creation and management functions... you: That is very poor. Mike: I can send you a demo of the control panel from which you can access the client account...? you: We need to know tech specs such as what version of php, what scripting features are included, mysql, etc, jsp? you: Okay. What is the demo location? Mike: That I can get your - I thought you emant a general "what can I do" list... you: Do you offer static IPs? you: Do you offer private nameservers? Mike: https://manage.thehostingsystem.com/ Mike: User: tmwelshy Mike: Password: welshy Mike: We do not offer static IP's or pricate nameservers, though we will offer the private nameservers eventually. you: That is bad you: Do you offer SSL? Mike: Not currently - it is scheduled for release shortly. you: That is even worse! you: Do you offer automated signup capabilities? Mike: You are mentioning poor and bad - do you mind if I ask what type of business you are in? you: web hosting Mike: Are you a straight reseller? you: what do you mean by a straight reseller? you: we are a reseller and retail provider of web hosting Mike: Is that your primary business, I meant. you: yes you: Do you offer automated signup capabilities? you: Hello are you there? Mike: No, we do not currently offer API or automated signup capabilities.Mosso is geared towards the designer/developer and integrator, so there will be some reseller functionality that you may like that we don't offer. you: That is very time consuming to manually add customers! you: I can't believe you dont offer automated signup you: Do you offer error logs? Mike: What do you mean by error logs - can you be more specific? you: Do you provide web server error logs relating to each domain? Mike: No, we would take care of that for you. you: that is terrible! you: we need logs to diagnose errors in customers scripts, etc you: Do you allow cron jobs? Mike: I'm sorry you feel that way. As I said, we would do that for you. No, we do not currently offer cronjobs. you: You don't offer cronjobs?!! What sort of system is this. you: Cronjobs are essential for reseller hosting you: Do you provide a manual backup process which can backup individual web sites from the control panel? Mike: AS I said, we are not a "reseller" option. Mike: You would back-up by FTP to a local machine. you: Doesnt matter if you are a reseller or not, all hosts should provide cronjobs. Many scripts require that functionality. you: You didn't answer my question. you: Do you provide a manual backup process which can backup individual web sites from the control panel? Mike: You would have to use your own FTP client. Mike: There is no option on the control panel. you: Also I cannot believe you said you are not a reseller option, as your web site boasts about being geared towards resellers, billing clients, etc. you: Oh dear - your control panel really is extremely basis isn't it. you: Do you provide a file manager then Mike: I first said what we were geared towards, then I mentioned again that we were not a "reseller" option after telling you that you would not have some functionality a straight reseller might want. Mike: No, we do not currently provide a file manager, though we will. you: That is pretty bad. you: Your service is very basic right now? Mike: So you said. you: Do you provide SSH? Mike: No, we do not allow SSH. you: Unbelievable! you: What OS are you running Mike: We operate on Windows and Linux simultaneously - that's on the site, by the way. Mike: How many sites do you currently manage? you: I mean, what operating system specifically are you running you: hello? you: are you there? Mike: Yes, just a moment please... you: Seems like you don't understand my basic question. I'll clarify then - are you running Windows 2003 for your Windows platform? Redhat Enterprise 3 or 4, or centOS for your Linix based service? Mike: The Hosting System’s Linux side of our platform is built on a customized Linux distribution based on Debian 3.1 (Sarge). On the other side of the fence, The Hosting System’s Windows platform runs on Windows 2003. you: thank you. Mike: I understood your question. Mike: You're welcome. you: do you provide any preinstalled scripts/applications? Mike: Is there anything further I can help you with? you: Yes, plenty. Mike: Let me ask you a question, if you don't mind - You have made it pretty clear you are not satisfied with our offering. What further purpose do you have here? you: I am evaluating your offering. you: Please advise whether you provide any preinstalled scripts/applications? Mike: No. We are designed for domain management for someone who hosting is a second, third or even fourth priority. you: Okay, well that seems very odd because you say that your system is designed for someone who is hosting a second, third or even fourth priority, however on your web site it suggests that your system is suitable for hosting unlimited web sites, and geared towards hosting resellers. Is this not true? you: I am just trying to get an understanding of exactly what features you offer so we can consider it. Mike: Ah. I see. I must have misunderstood your motives. My apologies. Mike: Our system is suitable for many types or providers. you: I dont know how you could have misunderstood, as my questions rare very clear. Mike: not your questions, your comments. As I said, I must have misunderstood your intent. you: Very strange. you: How many servers are in your enterprise clusters? you: You mean you have clusters on your homepage Mike: Server numbers vary considerably based on volume. I can't give you that number. Mike: you: Do you support tomcat? Mike: you mean you have clusters on your homepage? Can you tell me what that means? you: mean=mention you: Do you support tomcat? you: Hello? Mike: Do you mean do we offer Java support? you: I am referring to Apache Tomcat support you: Java servlets, etc Mike: No, we do not support Java. you: Seems like you don't support most things which is a shame you: Do you provide phpmyadmin then? Mike: I'm sorry you feel that way. May of the things we have discussed are coming, however. Mike: Yes. you: At last - you support something! you: Do you provide support to edit DNS zones through your control panel? Mike: I must be misinterpreting you again. That seems somewhat hostile.... you: I am just pleased that you finally support something I have requested you: Many of the basic things I would have expected are not supported Mike: Then I share in your joy. you: So do you provide DNS zone management through your control panel? Mike: For now you would make your request through support: there is no option through the control panel. you: How about password protected directory support? Mike: But in the future you will have DNS options in the control panel. Mike: Yes, you can password protect directory support. you: On your Windows offering, do you support ASP.NET 2.0? Mike: No, we are currently on .net 1.1. you: Oh dear. you: Well it seems like your features are very basic at this time. Mike: You mentioned that. you: Well I mean many of the things which I have requested are very common thesedays, yet you dont support them you: Thanks for answering my questions.
Posted by borghunn, 03-15-2006, 02:49 PM
You put the wright questions. An webhosting company that is not addressing to the webhosting industry is no good. A dedicated server with cpanel is a lot better than what they offer. It seems that they are not ready to fight with dedicated servers.
Posted by DevelopAl, 03-15-2006, 03:29 PM
sallyanne: You are a rude jerk. Most of the chat you have there we already knew, and you do not have to be an ahole to the operator. He is only doing his job. Your comments were uncalled for and arrogant. You obviously do not understand the concept of a niche market. Their service is geared towards web designers period. I agree their service lacks particular important features but I would not call it "poor" and jerk the operator as you did. It is only a matter of time before those features are implemente
Posted by 01globalnet, 03-15-2006, 03:41 PM
I stopped reading sallyanne's up to the middle - it make me feel so angry... DevelopAl says it all....
Posted by borghunn, 03-15-2006, 03:51 PM
His comments are rude, but his questions are OK. Have somebody tested their connection speed?
Posted by cphaynes, 03-15-2006, 04:06 PM
What the hell Sally? I've talked to Mosso people several times and they've always been very nice and surely do not deserve the crap you spewed towards their direction. Why were you such an A to them? It was totally obvious after the first few questions you wouldn't fit their hosting package, yet you kept on with being a 10 year old. I wouldn't want you as a customer even if my offerings fit what you were looking for. Mosso is new, geared for a specific market, and will always be adding new features. They're backed by Rackspace for crying out loud...they definately aren't going to sit around and not innovate. Lame.
Posted by keliix06, 03-15-2006, 04:07 PM
I can't believe Mike stayed through that whole chat. That is incredibly impressive.
Posted by DevelopAl, 03-15-2006, 04:26 PM
You are right... The only thing Sally proved to me is how well trained, courteous and educated their employees are. Goes to show...
Posted by sallyanne, 03-15-2006, 05:02 PM
Surprising comments, however in my opinion I was certainly not rude at all. I asked straight-forward questions, as well as made comments regarding their hosting service. If some people take offense to these comments, that is very unfortunate. It is disappointing the representative did not answer many questions specifically, and tried to - quite frankly - beat around the bush. Nevertheless, upon evaluating their service it is clear that Mossmo does not even offer many basic features which are essential for multiple domain hosting requirements, not to mention features which are offered by many other providers. My post here was not in any way made with the intention of being rude, but merely to provide the community with more detailed information regarding the features which Mosso supports.
Posted by mrzippy, 03-15-2006, 05:25 PM
Sallyanne, it's customers like you that I give the boot to. It's OBVIOUS that mosso.com is not a hosting solution for "reselling" in the same way as you would resell something like a cpanel server. Sure, you can get a million "pre-installed" scripts from a cpanel server... and you can get all kinds of nifty automation, etc... But that doesn't appeal to the average WEB DESIGNER who wants a 100% uptime for thier clients. People who are looking for this kind of clustered solution probably don't care much about whether they can install phpBB with 'one-click' or if they can push a button and have the account set up using an API. Mosso.com is obviously targetting the 'average' web designer who wants a highly reliable solution for their clients. Thank GOD they aren't targetting people like you, who undoubtedly would cause service/support quality to drop, as a result of the techs shooting themselves. But ya... I'm REALLY impressed the online sales guy didn't just ban you, and actually stayed on and answered all your idiotic questions, depsite BOTH of you knowing exactly what you were "really" trying to do.
Posted by cphaynes, 03-15-2006, 06:13 PM
This is by far one of the most ignorant posts I've read here on WHT. Mike answered your questions as best he could, even when you weren't very obvious and kept saying things like "Terrible". Once again, your ignorance shows, because you didn't research what type of host Mosso is...they don't targe the flea-market crowd you are in. They are hosting for high-end developers of webdesign who want quality uptime for clients, backed by great support. Also, you make statments like "essential for multiple domain hosting" and "Cronjobs are essential for reseller hosting". No...they aren't. Mosso obviously has a system in place that offers what websites need to function, or they wouldn't be in business to begin with. Do you have any idea what YOU are doing? I feel sorry for those people that you host for (if you do at all). It's quiet obvious you have a very limited education in regards to how hosting works. Amen brother. Sally is a great example as to why I have a dedicated box. Last edited by cphaynes; 03-15-2006 at 06:18 PM.
Posted by jjp-hp, 03-15-2006, 06:32 PM
After reading Sally’s post, I’m actually more impressed with Mosso.com now than I was before. Not because of their product but because of their customer service. Good job Mike!
Posted by Aussie Bob, 03-15-2006, 06:54 PM
They're not chasing the reseller market with their offerring - Yeah, why bother with fraud screening and unnneccessary things like that? It only takes a few minutes (if that) to setup a client on the server, after youi've checked them for fraud etc, and handling that manually is safer for all parties concerned. It's not like your signup rate as a reseller is high, and the workload to setup these new clients becomes too much.
Posted by layer0, 03-15-2006, 07:43 PM
Well that statement certainly represents your intelligence quite well.
Posted by Zeal Web Hosting, 03-15-2006, 09:15 PM
WOW! sallyanne, could you have been any more mean? You asked many questions that easily could have been found on their site without any trouble, you were negative about their service the whole time. Mike is not the owner maybe you didn't know that but he did not create Mosso.. You were being mean, condescending and he was answering everything he knew and getting information for you when he was not 100% sure, he was pretty much giving perfect support even when the potential customer was being the worst one they could have. MOST of what you asked was already answered in this thread and really was just a waste of time. I am REALLY impressed with their support, they will talk to anyone, through anything. Even you if asked EVERY possible question like you did, even though they were answered in this thread and some on their homepage you could have at least done it nicely.
Posted by MyDigitalHost, 03-15-2006, 11:50 PM
I too must weigh in here. I'd have to say that what you posted sallyanne, came across as very antagonistic and uncouth. I'm embarrassed that you posted it here as a member of WHT. Just about everything you "asked" about, had already been discussed in this thread and served no purpose other than to feed your ego. It reminds me a bit of that one person in I.T. training classes that always comes across as a know-it-all and deliberately asks questions to stump the trainer. Extremely annoying. You should hang your head in shame because you came across.....not so good.
Posted by borghunn, 03-16-2006, 01:44 AM
You are as rude as sally. But at least he had something to say. Untill now everybody said that mosso is a great reseller opportunity. Well, is not. They say it, not I. And I think they are overselling. 2000 GB = ~8-10 mbps dedicated. Not even with cogent they will not be able to offer that much bandwidth. Just because they put the Rackspace name on their site, does not make them perfect and does not prohibit us to ask question. With a dedicated server you know exactly what you can do or what you can not. Here, you must ask, test, spend time to figure out if you made a mistake or the sistem do not suport your script, etc, and time is money. Have somebody tested their data transfer speed?
Posted by DomainWorks, 03-16-2006, 01:57 AM
News story about Mosso. I think they're not expecting to convert bedrock dedicated server users, but have prioritized the feature set for designer/developer resellers who like the discount dedicated prive point but want a simpler interface. I doubt these folks are running a lot of cron jobs. The outsourced tech support and billing will be an attraction for a lot of these folks. I understand they have 18 employees. The support staff is separate from Rackspace, but I gather the "fanatical" theme will still be central to their approach to support. I was also impressed that Mike the Support Guy stuck with the SallyAnne inquiry.
Posted by KGIII, 03-16-2006, 04:21 AM
Well, at least we know their support it capable of sticking it out with "customers" though yeah, I'd be issuing a refund and tossing them out the door. KGIII
Posted by thebigH, 03-18-2006, 09:53 PM
I think you guys were much more rude to Sally than she was to Mike. If one guy pointed out Sally's mistake I see no point in everyone repeating the same thing. I think Sally's intention was to provide detailed information on Mosso's features with first hand information. Other posts on the thread were conflictng. She was rude to the OP, her mistake but I think her intention was to provide information and she didn't deserve all that unneccessary B.S from so many of you. First 2 replies were enough.
Posted by layer0, 03-19-2006, 09:20 AM
I think I am going to have to repeat this again. This product is not intended for most WHT-hosts (or that's how I classify them at least...). I repeate, not intended. If you do straight up reselling (as said by Mike) this product is not for you. This is for web designers who would like to compliment their service with *reliable*, *secure* web hosting. Those web designers don't care if they have cron jobs or the ability to edit a DNS zone. That just isn't needed for them. They want peace of mind - and Mosso delivers that with 100% uptime. All of you need to realize that Mosso is most likely not for you, but they fit their target market very well. You can bash them all you want, but I can tell you that their idea will be very successful. Have a nice day. P. S. Sally - you are the type of customer that I would personally terminate as soon as I heard them speak. Granted, I guess that's why I'm not a customer care rep.
Posted by mrzippy, 03-19-2006, 11:16 AM
If Sally's intention had merely been to obtain detained information, he/she would have merely asked the questions and then posted the answers. Instead, we are treated to a moronic conversation between a *very* patient sales rep and one totally off-base person with a hidden motive. A conversation full of leading questions, rude and snide remarks to try and provoke the sales rep, etc. It's one thing to ask a lot of questions (I did the same thing with their livechat AND via phone call), and then ask again for clarification/details. But it's quite another to make all the idiotic remarks. That's the dead "giveaway" behind Sally's true intentions. How would you feel if a prospective customer phoned you up and asked, "do you support UIM"? (Not a real technology.) You reply, "Not at this time, but please let me take your info and I'll have my manager call you.".. the response is something like: "You are an idiot. Your company SUCKS. Everyone else offers UIM, so I don't see why you don't. Do you offer UIM2?" Pretty sure you'd hang up and quickly use the "ban this caller" feature of your phone.
Posted by wubwob, 03-19-2006, 05:05 PM
Massos setup is very impressive..
Posted by Zeal Web Hosting, 03-19-2006, 05:06 PM
Yeah I wish they had a few other features and I would be there super fast..
Posted by digitalmark, 03-23-2006, 03:45 PM
I find the simplicity (elegance) of the Mosso panel to be valuable. It doesn't have all the clutter and confusion of the commercial panels, though it is limited in features. To designers (and specially to end-clients who are not techies) this is a friendly, usable, and clean control panel. Designing and developing something that's simple is often more challenging than throwing all the features in a linear craplist. As soon as they get SSL + SFTP, I think they'll have a rush.
Posted by borghunn, 03-24-2006, 01:38 AM
Well, I don't think it is friendly at all. If you want to ad a subdomain, you will find it very confusing, because subdomains are treated as domains, and you have to set every aspect of a domain- bandwith, space, etc, even if you create only a subdomain. This is not a friendly control panel. Can somebody tell the mosso bandwith speed they got? If somebody has a file hosted with them, can we make a speed test?
Posted by mrzippy, 03-24-2006, 05:45 AM
Again, the answer to this question is that the target market they are pursuing is highly unlikely to even know what a subdomain is.. let alone actually "need" one. We have many "premium" hosting customers, and none of them use subdomains. None. Not one. Click their livechat button and ask them. They'll give you a file, IP, website, and anything else you need to test their service.
Posted by borghunn, 03-24-2006, 07:31 AM
This is my point exactly. They do not offer webhosting for general public. They are not in "webhosting bussiness", but more in webhosting suport. I was interested in real life situation, and the speed to be tested by people whit servers in different locations. I do not think that somebody would exceed their bandwidth by putting for a short period of time a file to be downloded. I ask because I do not get very good speeds, and I do not want to say something bad about them that actualy is not true.
Posted by mrzippy, 03-24-2006, 07:55 AM
There servers are in the rackspace datacenters, so you can use any server that is hosted at rackspace and you'll get the same results.
Posted by borghunn, 03-24-2006, 08:11 AM
I'm interested in speed, not ping.
Posted by xmats, 03-24-2006, 08:25 AM
Mosso runs PHP in safe mode and has disabled mod rewrite. Thought this might be useful information. So far I`m really impressed by their support.
Posted by phvt, 03-24-2006, 02:18 PM
According to phpinfo, safe_mode is Off and open_basedir is unset. Support for mod_rewrite is on their todo list.
Posted by xmats, 03-24-2006, 02:21 PM
Strange. Just talked with one of their sales reps about this. He claimed safe mode was on serverwide 1 hour ago. I still haven't ordered yet so I do not have access to the server.
Posted by keliix06, 03-24-2006, 02:40 PM
Which was his point exactly. The crowd browsing this forum is not the market they are after. I also have a company serving high end clients, and I believe we have 1 of them using a subdomain. They want their website to be up and their email to be delivered. Beyond that they really could care less.
Posted by jagsinc, 03-28-2006, 02:28 AM
This is the best point I have seen on this thread as I just got off "live-chat" with both RackSpace dedicated and Mosso. RS dedicated sales wouldn't give me the contact info on their spin-off Mosso when I inquired - they just didnt answer the question. I have sales reponses from both in my inbox. This certain client would do fine on Mosso - they have little bandwidth demand - just need a lot of hand holding on the support end. This is a direct loss to RS dedicated because I was originally steering this client towards the dedicated division due to the support. Thx. GW
Posted by froggerd, 03-31-2006, 11:39 PM
For $100, why not try it? Plus, you could tell us how it went!?! I am very curious. It really looks impressive. The sales guy gave me a demo and it looks very very good. I have not heard anything negative, so I am leaning towards going forward. Would appreciate any more insight.
Posted by ungabunga, 04-01-2006, 02:34 AM
Hi, The service is very good! Sales guy Mike was on hand and let us know all we asked and the support is far better than i have ever used before. Even just asking small things like were is this... on the control panel. We will now more all of our non SSL websites and customer sites over and as soon as they add the SSL all will move over! James
Posted by froggerd, 04-06-2006, 08:19 AM
Can you give us any more details? Where are you moving from? How is the performance? Last time I talked to their rep, they were putting SSL in beta--do you have other news? No hassle admin with great, dedicated like performance sounds too good to be true, but there model seems intent on doing it. Thanks for any info.
Posted by ungabunga, 04-06-2006, 09:39 AM
Hi, We have moved over from oneandone UK after been told they were the best for what we needed at the time. As a year pasted there customer service and support was shite. So we were lookng at moving our and our customer sites to rackspace and then Mosso poped up. As they were part of rackspace we gave them a go and its working well. As many of our customers did not have the need for SSL it has been ok. we have a few that run online stores and we will move them over as soon as SSL is added. They keep saying its number one on there list but as of yet no dates. But in there forums its all we tal about with the reps and they are working on it. James
Posted by msti, 04-06-2006, 12:58 PM
I thought safe_mode is on.
Posted by pueblosnet, 04-06-2006, 07:12 PM
Mike you are my hero!
Posted by phvt, 04-06-2006, 07:56 PM
Well...I'm looking right at the phpinfo() output on my Mosso account and it says safe_mode is Off. I do not have a production site on Mosso, but the system looks very promising. I'm just waiting for the deployment of SSL and mod_rewrite, both of which are coming sometime soon (hopefully very soon). I'm betting these are challenging features to deploy because of the mixed Windows/Linux cluster environment. It's a bit strange that they've launched the service without these standard features (especially SSL), but they do have a solid platform that's great for many sites so I guess they went for it.
Posted by Ryles Canwr, 04-08-2006, 03:18 AM
Wow, I'm glad I found this thread, I had never heard of mosso before. It looks really interesting, I'm going to try and get a demo login.
Posted by nwproph3t, 04-08-2006, 03:25 AM
Same. Earlier in the thread someone posted a demo login thats still working. I'm interested in this, something to keep an eye on once they add in more features.
Posted by Zeal Web Hosting, 04-08-2006, 03:40 AM
Yeah it is a very nice offer and I will def be signing up shortly now actually. I have been told by Mike the lead sales person that SSL is being tested by existing customers at the end of this week, that would be tomorrow but this is not a 100% set date.
Posted by Burhan, 04-08-2006, 07:32 AM
I think mosso would be targeting people that generally go to companies like mt -- and I think that they would have a good fight Nice website design though; very impressive. For whom they are targetting, this is a very well thought out plan. Give them the right assurances (uptime, support, friendly control panel, known-name backing) and they will sign up in droves. Most of their clients won't know what is vb or mod_rewrite, its just the kind of people that want to host a portfolio or maybe a blog, and for that, I think this is perfect. Good job Mosso
Posted by layer0, 04-08-2006, 08:45 AM
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Posted by domotre, 04-08-2006, 03:49 PM
Does mosso changes the rules of hosting business?
Posted by Aussie Bob, 04-08-2006, 09:37 PM
No, because there are no "rules" in a free and competitive marketplace. They have a great product there, and are overselling to the hilt, but I'm sure their platform can handle it. They'll attract a lot of developers and not so much resellers. It's a dodgy supply for a hosting business, as it means you're trapped using their platform and it's not like switching suppliers who both use cpanel. Most hosts using a reseller account for supply are also itching to get into their own servers, and grow their business that way.
Posted by nwproph3t, 04-08-2006, 10:13 PM
I wouldn't expect it to be too hard to transition from them to someone else as long as you didn't run multiple accounts, which is why I am interested in trying it out.
Posted by (Stephen), 04-08-2006, 10:20 PM
Thier MSSQL is $10 per 100MB per month, for a serious windows end user needing mssql, this could be a very big issue. If you are a reseller for them I could see this being the biggest expense you incur with mosso in the long term, more expensive than the hosting itself. To have a very usable MSSQL DB(transaction logs and the like, even on simple) you need at least 20MB space per DB, at $10 per 100MB that is not many DBs.
Posted by pueblosnet, 04-09-2006, 11:16 AM
mosso it's only available in english
Posted by RossH, 04-09-2006, 10:42 PM
Is everyone happy with mosso so far?
Posted by froggerd, 04-14-2006, 08:17 AM
Who is mt? I have seen the demo and for me, this is a great option. I have not signed up yet, but it appears to have almost all I need. In the forums, there is mention of mod_rewrite capability on the way very very soon, so it does look like mosso will get more robust.
Posted by xmats, 04-14-2006, 08:43 AM
MediaTemple - http://www.mediatemple.net/ I'm thinking of switching to Mosso as well when they sort their mod_rewrite stuff out. I really need that. I haven't really been able to confirm wether or not PHP runs in safe mode yet. Some say it does, some say it doesn't. Mosso has so far told me safe mode is on, but I see several customers in this thread claiming it is off. Anyone know what the policy really is?
Posted by layer0, 04-14-2006, 08:56 AM
Bob, How do you know this? They could very well have the resources to offer that space / bandwidth ratio should every customer need to use it ...
Posted by Aussie Bob, 04-14-2006, 11:04 AM
Very highly unlikely. You can't offer 80GB disk and 2TB of rackspace quality data transfer for $100/mth, and not expect to have an element of overselling. Overselling is not questioned, it's just the level of overselling, needed to make those numbers work. I don't think they'll have much of a problem. Look at Gmail with 2TB disk space for every Gmail account. Google took overselling through the ceiling there.
Posted by Ryan Smith, 04-14-2006, 11:09 AM
I thought it was 2GB? Either way, Your right, 2GB of free space is nothing but overselling.
Posted by phvt, 04-14-2006, 11:09 AM
I just asked Mosso via live chat. I was told that safe_mode is supposed to be off (and it is), and that it will remain that way.
Posted by Aussie Bob, 04-14-2006, 11:14 AM
Oops, yeah, I meant 2GB space for Gmail.
Posted by Ryan Smith, 04-14-2006, 11:21 AM
It would be cool thought because I'm already using 95% of my account so far
Posted by domotre, 04-14-2006, 03:31 PM
any try to mosso yet ?
Posted by drakazz, 04-14-2006, 07:14 PM
I've logged into a (demo?) panel, as for the conversation log somewhere in this thread. Seems interesting - very simple stuff. I looked on adding the users - really quiet not happy about that - no idea why The whole thing [at least for me], was quiet confusing. There was hsoting plans or something - what the o_O, not making much sense. Looks more of some kind of inventory or something... no idea. The design is very nice and loved it =] Hadn't tried out anything yet really and not going to. I think that they're a very reliable good host, from so far seeint these things, and why are web developers trying to get this host to a bad position? So far- this is to be for Web designers, who need to setup websites quickly without problems using their designs. The company seems honest about what they offer. Bt I don't understand why is "System" portrayed as better than a dedicated server there. It's got all the points marksd nicely except SSH I don't understand oen thing - TrueHybrid o_O? How can this work? Linux + Windows in one? On their flash banner it's quiet nicely said that PHP is a Linux technology - which doesn't make much sense to me. Their website is running jsp pages, Apache/Tomcat. Sound more of a thing like it's all on a Windows server rather than some kind of Hybrid. Anyne who's using the host, can you do phpinfo(); test and show some paths please? As well as .NET checking (Idon't know how ) to see what this is. I've never heard of anything as such [in my life]. I've read through the FAQ, seems to answer soem of my questions but still sounds quiet "crazy". Well, still it's definately aimed at Web designers and not techy guys like me. I don't really like to have no SSH access, I just love it! One of the greatest things that could be ever offered. Maybe #2 (Support is #1!!).
Posted by M7I, 04-15-2006, 09:03 AM
From my understanding, and yes I do have a account with them that I am testing, the load balancer passes the appropriate scripts to the appropriate server. Currently, html as well as asp and other windows type scripts are passed to a windows server. php is passed to a linux server. Although I am not sure how many would need this, it does allow you to use php, asp and html on the same site and get native performance for each one. From what I have been told, they are beta testing a system, where you can select which system the .html is served from. This would allow you to use .htaccess as well as mod_rewrite on your sites. Control panel still needs some features as well as a few fixes as well. But it is worth a try for me, someone who hosts quite a few sites of my own and wants very high reliability.
Posted by electricfox, 04-15-2006, 11:59 AM
I bit the bullet and signed up with them. So far I am very unimpressed, for a number of important reasons. 1) They are obviously a BETA service. Most features do not work as expected, or at all. No where near 100% reliabilty yet, they've had some major crashes with 45 downtime. 2) Their customer support by chat is fast and available, but crippled. Most things have to go through a ticket system. This ticket system has so far proved VERY slow. I'm used to the response times of Vortech of about 5-30 minutes. Thus far I've been waiting 36 hours on two fairly major errors. 3) Here's an example of the bugginess of the system: my first site move was a disaster - for some reason, the server never pulled up the image files I loaded, even though they were clearly in the ftp server. This has been resolved, but the ticket has not been responded to. The CP has thrown several unhandled errors at me and it's obvious they rushed it into production. 4) Or take the lack of features: no htaccess support, 5-minute+ server-wide caching of dynamic pages, a strange lack of support for pages with brackets in their forms or URLs (i.e. countries[] would break the system). Case in point: when I asked the instant chat tech how I could add a database to an existing client I just set up, I was told I would have to delete the account and check "Additional Databases" during the account signup process. The ability to add databases to an existing client is a "feature" that is "being worked on". Riiight. All these things are "being worked on" with no ETA. I don't mind a work in progress, but I don't appreciate being sucked in by some slick marketing that describes services as they will be in six months. Pay $100/mo to be a beta tester, with my paying clients? Please prove me wrong mosso, and get really good really fast! I want this to be the solution for me! Last edited by electricfox; 04-15-2006 at 12:03 PM.
Posted by Ryan Smith, 04-15-2006, 12:04 PM
What domain are you using with them? And with the lack of features, you should have asked before you signed up
Posted by electricfox, 04-15-2006, 12:08 PM
I did ask, and did a lot of thinking. But no, I guess I just assumed that there would be support for brackets in forms. Oh yeah, I guess I should have asked. My bad SSX. my personal site, aboutbryan.com is up there and seems to be working fine.
Posted by MyDigitalHost, 04-15-2006, 12:15 PM
electricfox, Very nice personal site by the way. I like the use of sticky notes Simply saying that he should have asked before signing up is besides the point. Electricfox is offering up his opinion, as he bit the bullet and signed up with them. I appreciate any and all reviews about mosso since it saves me spending $100 / mo on finding these things out on my own. Greg
Posted by phvt, 04-15-2006, 01:17 PM
I can back up Electrofox's assessment. Mosso only went live around March 1st, 2006. They they started building/hyping "the hosting system/thesystembeatstheserver.com" back in August 2004 (or earlier), so I imagine they were eager to go live as soon as they felt they had a functioning system. A fix for the brackets problem, .htaccess/mod_rewrite support, php5, and SSL are now being tested by some customers. I've kept testing because I want this platform to work, but it's a frustrating start. If you need a huge, reliable shared hosting account (and these issues aren't a problem) then Mosso is worth considering. If you actually *need* the same site to have both Linux and Windows technologies it's a revolution. Otherwise, you should probably wait and let Mosso polish the rough edges, improve its support system and round out its feature set. Hopefully the wait won't be a long one.
Posted by gattoo, 04-17-2006, 03:55 AM
I am looking at a community site which can have say 100K users everyday. will mosso support that kinda load?
Posted by reiteration, 04-17-2006, 04:00 AM
http://www.hyperspin.com/ranking.php?type=3
Posted by borghunn, 04-17-2006, 10:20 AM
They might support it, but I don't think they will lett you stay. Mosso is for little sites. Don't belive everithing you read. "The system" vs server is just for marketing. If you want performance, take a dedicated server. Or a cluster. Their target is little developer who don't like to deal with hosting problems, and like to have somebody to talk whith if he has a problem.
Posted by 01globalnet, 04-17-2006, 11:44 AM
Mosso is a shared system, so the restrictions that any shared hosting provider has almost the same apply to mosso, too.
Posted by electricfox, 04-17-2006, 07:37 PM
Well, since I'm in the system, I might as well tell you guys on the outside what's up. I won't be on the inside for long though, whatever sites and customers I had on the system on a trial basis are moving back asap. Event: Today, mosso's entire cluster went down. As of 1 hour ago, you'll notice on my personal site, all my files are gone. Thank goodness for backup and that I kept the account open at Vortech. Of course, I discover this only by visiting the forums, I never got an e-mail from them and would not have known my sites were down. My conclusion: mosso is a good idea that was launched way too early. I will be requesting a full credit and cancellation with them shortly. Evidence and reason for this from mosso.com client-only forums: Posted by Todd (mosso's founder) at 1:30pm est: As you might be aware sites hosted on Mosso are currently affected by a hardware issue. We are doing to our best to discover what led up to to this outage. Please understand that your success is foremost in our minds and we are doing all we can to remedy this issue as expeditiously as possible. I'll post more info as soon as I have a more definitive explanation. Another post at 4:30pm: Mosso's web content downtime continues to persist. I would like to provide you with an updated status. I will post in depth once the issue is resolved, but for now we have our entire team focused on resolving this issue as quickly as possible. Problems with multiple nodes of our cluster continue to affect the availability of web content. (Email, the control panel, and MySQL / MS SQL clusters are not affected.) Fixes are being deployed immediately and a full restore of your websites and content is expected. Timing at this point is unclear, but I will continue to provide updates every 30 minutes on this forum, and will post a full report when the issue is entirely resolved. Thank you for your incredible patience. More to come. As of 30 minutes ago: Isaac, to answer your question (electricfox: about why mosso.com is up, but not our sites), the site Mosso.com is a Java application that is served from the same service cluster that runs the control panel. Once Java is available for Mosso customers, we look forward to bringing the site and control panel into the same architecture. Currently, customer sites have been impacted by a confluence of events that have prevented all of our front-end servers from accessing customer data stored on our SAN cluster. That's a short take at the explanation, I will have a full report once the issue is resolved. We are now on a fixed path to resolution and I should be able to provide an ETA shortly. I hope for their sake this is a temporary growing pain, and not proof that a shared cluster is simply not workable.
Posted by phvt, 04-17-2006, 08:02 PM
Yup, all web sites were down all day EST and are currently being restored from last night's backup. Very disappointing, including the level of communication during the first hours of the downtime. Email/webmail and database systems have kept running, so saying "Mosso's entire cluster" is not quite accurate. I was pretty surprised when my test email went out and back without a problem.
Posted by digitalmark, 04-17-2006, 10:42 PM
I was there too. Pretty sad. But I have to say that their tech support lines were well prepared for what I'm sure must have been an onslaught of calls. I never waited more than 10secs to get through. (Perhaps because they still have a small base.) I thought it was THE solution despite particular features yet to come into place. But this does make me question a huge complicated "infrastructure" vs. simple series of dedicated or shared servers that can more easily be restored. As for the bandwidth issue above... 2000GB /mo at an average (without spikes) comes to 0.77Mbytes /sec continuously. I don't know (haven't asked) if there are penalties for overages. But do you have a site that's pushing 800KB/sec? Or in other words the 100K users/day would each need to pull 667K/day which raises the question what type of content are you serving in the "community"? Currently, all my sites on The Hosting System are pushing 0.0000 bytes. I expect should get covered on netcraft.com where I first read of Mosso.
Posted by chickenbak, 04-17-2006, 11:46 PM
It is off...if they told you it was on, they were mistaken. On both the php4 and the php5 interpreters, it is switched off.
Posted by domotre, 04-18-2006, 07:34 PM
Just curious, Why mosso is most cheapper than Hostopia or inquent ?, Because they're running the same business model, I think so.
Posted by gattoo, 04-19-2006, 01:20 AM
what type of content are you serving in the "community"? That's is a nice one. But I will like to correct : 100K users / day to take in 667 K bandwidth. We should take a note of page views. at a normal page size of say 66 KB, there will be 100K page views per day. That sort of traffic is pretty normal for a decent site.
Posted by gattoo, 04-19-2006, 01:33 AM
Electricfox, You said about Vortech. They look to be cheaper. What is your opinion about them?
Posted by electricfox, 04-19-2006, 12:10 PM
I'm sure a Vortech thread is on the forum someplace, gattoo, so I don't water down the mosso thread wit info about them. I've been with them awhile (several years) and I really like their services. No end user support, but everything else is top-notch and super-affordable for what you get. Now, in follow-up to my previous post, I wish to communicate how very impressed I am with how mosso handled the situation at hand. Realizing the downtime reflected very poorly on their promises, they went WAY above and beyond their already generous SLA. By that I mean I would know of no other host that would extend such an offer. And get this - not only did they e-mail me to let me know, they also called me. That's right, my account rep called me. I know of no other reseller host that would bother. I know the offer only applies to people who were on board before the downtime, so I won't bring up specifics, but what I can say is that I'm sticking it out and staying with them for awhile. I'll probably move my personal site back over (aboutbryan.com), and I will try to come back every few months to update you on the going-ons with that. But I must stress here - while I'm not entirely convinced in reliability of the mosso system, I can definitely say that the people behind this solution are really good people, who care about their customers and speak to their concerns. They obviously have a lot to work on, but having good people is a great start.
Posted by digitalmark, 04-19-2006, 01:04 PM
I have agree with electricfox on that. Also, I've setup monitoring on Mosso against other resellers I had "trial" accounts on (30-day money back) on hostingspeeds.com. My Mosso domain has had rock solid rankings--top 20% for USA, top 12% worldwide--and hitting ranks of 7 and 8 on some days... though generally hovering around 65-75 (U.S.) Edit: Vortech is at 119/491 US and 373/1269 today. Their CP still needs maturing. As do many features. But their customer service is truly unmatched. They are a company that really listens to their customers, and I've witnessed over the period of a month I've been with them that they are working hard to implement what their resellers request. Last edited by digitalmark; 04-19-2006 at 01:07 PM.
Posted by keith70, 04-19-2006, 06:09 PM
Electricfox....thanks for that information!!! That is what we are looking for. I also have accounts at Vortech. Please keep us posted of events there at Mosso.com
Posted by layer0, 04-19-2006, 09:11 PM
Honestly, hostingspeeds.com doesn't exactly use the most logical methods for finding the 'fastest' hosts, I honestly would not trust it one bit. Useless data, IMHO.
Posted by digitalmark, 04-20-2006, 03:10 AM
Please explain... They batch test from 16 different locations worldwide. They measure server response time and pageload time using a 100k file. In my humble observeration, the numbers I see support my experience with the hosts I've put on trial (with my own accounts). Granted there are fluctuations. And I expect that the pageload time could be tweaked for advantagous results (by unethical registrants).
Posted by layer0, 04-20-2006, 09:50 AM
I re-call once they had an issue with their script causing extremely low results (0.0000 we are talking) in page generation time for hosts with a PHP accelerator compiled. Hosts could also simply place this on their 'fastest' server, perhaps one that hosts very few sites. Also, they measure ping time which isn't necessarily indictive of speed. I honestly would not use that to guage whether or not a host's server is fast. The best solution is to put your own application on the host's server and see for yourself how fast it runs. You could be last place in Hosting Speeds but as long as you are satisfied with how your application runs, there is no problem with that host.
Posted by mripguru, 04-20-2006, 09:55 AM
Hmmm.... there are *many* shared clusters that have been operating flawlessly for several months/years - though, it really all depends in the planning that's been put into creating the clustered environment and the subsequent execution of said plan.
Posted by layer0, 04-20-2006, 09:58 AM
electricfox, It depends on what you mean by a shared cluster...I have personally seen a shared cluster perform beautifully and average with 99.9x% uptime across each machine. Now, of course this is not the 'load-balanced', 'zero-downtime' architecture that Mosso is trying to advertise. But, IMHO, it's pretty sad that they had their HTTP cluster segment down for so long, despite their claims of a reliable, near 'downtime-less' setup. They can of course make this up by having 100% uptime from this point on, but I somehow doubt that will happen
Posted by mywebserver109, 04-21-2006, 12:36 AM
the good points are good, but bad points, it depends on what you need. if you dont need private server or dedicated ip, then they are not really bad.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 04-22-2006, 01:51 AM
We havent had any issues what so ever with our shared cluster Well, several companies have advertsied 100% uptime, high availability clusters for quite some time. The reality is, this doesnt exist (at least nowhere near the price that Mosso is talking about) Whether it is shared storage arrays, load balancers, etc - there are potentially multiple single points of failure for this type of system. In the price bracket Mosso, Hostopia, etc are playing in - a well maintained, undersold, services cluster will always perform better (in my opinion) then an oversold "high availability" solution... I wonder why a company would target high end users, who supposedly do not want the headaches associated with hosting and who are willing to pay a premium for near perfection - would go to market with the pricing model they are advertising.... Seems to me that the concept is sound, however, personally, I don't think they have approached this the right way nor are their price points attracting the most obvious target audience... Great to hear their support is excellent - that will certainly make up for any growing pains, but, I wonder if you won't see their pricing go up over time...
Posted by webnetwork, 04-22-2006, 06:57 AM
the way i looked at the description for me is a good deal even if doesnt have a control panel and a ssl certificate...
Posted by mripguru, 04-22-2006, 10:28 AM
Hmmm.... I wonder indeed, especially being a Rackspace venture and in a Rackspace facility.
Posted by froggerd, 04-29-2006, 04:18 PM
QUOTE=CartikaHosting]W I wonder why a company would target high end users, who supposedly do not want the headaches associated with hosting and who are willing to pay a premium for near perfection - would go to market with the pricing model they are advertising.... Seems to me that the concept is sound, however, personally, I don't think they have approached this the right way nor are their price points attracting the most obvious target audience... What do you mean by this? Do you think they should charge more? You can buy a discount server for much less than $100.
Posted by layer0, 04-29-2006, 05:19 PM
Yes, for those who cannot comprehend his perfectly fine English, he does want them to charge more realistic pricing. I'm not even going to bother responding to that ignorant, irrelevant statement.
Posted by froggerd, 04-30-2006, 07:25 PM
Wow. Tough board. Seems like a utility like offering with the same specs as a dedicated server could be offered at the same price. Even though reliability is better and there is more flexibility, this is the whole promise of the utility hype - pooled resources; 1+1=3. Am I missing something? All this said, it does seem like a screaming deal.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 04-30-2006, 10:13 PM
You cannot compare an offering like Mosso with a budget dedicated server Yes, you are missing the following: 1) dual platform (ie 2 servers) 2) server management 3) high availability 4) white label 5) end user support (email, phone, live chat) Wonder what the cost of your budget environment is now?
Posted by xmats, 05-08-2006, 11:20 AM
I talked to Mosso again, they now do support mod_rewrite which is what makes me ready for the switch.
Posted by froggerd, 05-14-2006, 07:58 PM
Good points. What do you think it should cost?
Posted by cartika-andrew, 05-14-2006, 10:24 PM
If I was to put together an offering like Mosso (with the assumptions that it was exactly as advertised - ie) Tier 1 hardware, bandwith, true HA with 100% uptime, full end user support - the real kind, where you service your customers end users like your own - ) Our pricing model would look closer to what dynamicnet is doing vs what Mosso is doing... Last edited by cartika-andrew; 05-14-2006 at 10:27 PM.
Posted by borghunn, 05-15-2006, 03:40 AM
And haw did you came to such costs? At 10$/GB, only if you sell weapons or drugs online will make any sens in buying such a hosting.
Posted by mripguru, 05-15-2006, 06:48 AM
I disagree - because some people (who's primary market is not hosting) will want/need a system like this where the provider does all the work for them under a private label (or unbranded label) and are willing to pay for that kind of service. What Mosso is offering is too many resources for too little money. It's pretty clear (to me, anyways) that they're overselling their HA cluster (which should NEVER happen if you want true HA that you can depend on). I think IHSL hit it right on the head when he said that this is all a marketing ploy for Rackspace Managed Servers for people who either outgrow "the system" or are unhappy with the performance of the cluster. Just my 0.02 cents.
Posted by Haddy, 06-05-2006, 01:26 AM
I know its an old thread but lots of info in here that would be lost with a new thread... Anybody have any more comments about their experiences so far with Mosso...Especially anybody who has used the RackSpace brand before...
Posted by Neosurge, 06-05-2006, 10:46 AM
I used mosso for some busy sites I was hosting to see if they could handle it. In the two weeks they were hosting me, there were 2-3 occurances of downtime, the bandwidth reporting didnt work and they forced me to remove the sites from their cluster stating they were using too much resources (two moderately busy proxy sites). I moved the sites back to their dedicated server (p4 3ghz 2gb ram) where they have been running happily ever since. Thus concludes my experience with their clustered hosting.
Posted by RossH, 06-05-2006, 01:05 PM
I tested it out and found it quite slow as well.
Posted by Haddy, 06-05-2006, 01:25 PM
Hmm interesting experiences... How many sites do you run off of that dedicated server you put your sites back on? Seems like it may be a good option for alot of smaller sites than a few big sites...As what most designers will bring to the table...
Posted by Neosurge, 06-10-2006, 01:52 AM
One optimized machine handles it properly. Since then, the sites have been growing but the same machine is still handleing the load.
Posted by highphilosopher, 06-20-2006, 03:56 PM
I would like to put in my two cents about mosso so here goes. I have found their service to be good, fast, and reliable. Granted, we have not been hosted through them for very long, we are running one certain website which pulls ~8.5 million hits per month. I have yet to have a problem either with the speed, setup, or service. We will see if it continues this way or not. I will post here again in a couple of months for an update. Now, for those of you who are whining about the lack of features in the control panel, most of the things you are wanting to do can be accomplished through other means, like .htaccess files. And how many people really use the pre-install scripts that cpanel and plesk usually offer? Personally I prefer to take a little extra time, and be sure everything is setup right.
Posted by RossH, 06-20-2006, 04:15 PM
And which site is this?
Posted by highphilosopher, 06-20-2006, 08:07 PM
Sorry, I guess that information would have been helpful. The site is emovieposter.com. Now this may be a little bit different kind of site, most of the areas of this site were custom-made, mainly because there was not an open source script out there to do what I needed to do.
Posted by h4wk, 06-20-2006, 08:51 PM
emovieposter.com is very fast. i looked at dnsstuff and it seems to be hosted at rackspace (mosso). So he is telling the truth.
Posted by highphilosopher, 06-20-2006, 10:09 PM
I don't mean to blow my own horn, but that is partially due to good coding techniques. It can make a real difference in page load time and general site responsiveness.
Posted by Bashar, 06-21-2006, 06:48 PM
one critical issue, no backup plans? nor automated method to pull backups off remote location?
Posted by highphilosopher, 06-21-2006, 08:14 PM
actually for backups, I use a desktop app called cobian backup. It can pull files from ftp server, zip 'em up and do incremental, diff., or full backups.
Posted by KGIII, 06-21-2006, 09:44 PM
Anyone got any in-depth reviews at this point? I'd be VERY interested in hearing what people have to say now that they've been around for a bit and, I believe, a number of folks are giving them a trial run. How are they doing at providing the features they said they'd be including for instance? They mentioned SSL and a few other things would be coming soon and, well, I'm interested in finding out if they're really going to follow up on those because that, right there, tells me their true intent of keeping people satisfied AND improving their product/service. KGIII
Posted by Chaw, 06-24-2006, 05:13 PM
is overselling allowed?
Posted by FIAHOST, 06-24-2006, 05:34 PM
Yes, it is.
Posted by pueblosnet, 06-25-2006, 07:49 AM
anyone know when spanish will be available with this system? they tell me that have no idea
Posted by Helping, 06-25-2006, 06:59 PM
Is there a max_questions limit per db user on mosso? If yes what is the limit?
Posted by FIAHOST, 06-26-2006, 01:02 AM
The panel is available in English only for the time being. I don't know about max_questions limit, you should ask them, this is a very specific question. You can open a chat at any time from their website.
Posted by CEL-Arun, 06-26-2006, 06:39 AM
No APIs - that is quite a dealbuster for me. Otherwise, there's a lot that can be done with this platform.
Posted by turnkeywonk, 07-19-2006, 07:22 PM
I talked with a lower level support person on live chat and was told my technical question would have to be answered by sales when they returned the next day. He took my information down and I haven't heard back for about a week now. They lost my business.
Posted by layer0, 07-19-2006, 07:23 PM
Did you give them a phone number as well? (if it was just e-mail then it is possible that their e-mail ended up in a junk mail folder)
Posted by FIAHOST, 07-21-2006, 10:15 AM
We have just terminated an account with them. The idea behind the system is excellent but the system itself is not ready.
Posted by Apolo, 07-21-2006, 11:19 AM
Hi, Would you mind to share with us the reasons you did so? Thanks!
Posted by FIAHOST, 07-21-2006, 12:23 PM
We were looking for a solution to provide PHP5, MS SQL, ASP... to our customers. Mosso’s solution was well presented, so I decided to sign up with them and my webmaster started building new website to promote these new solutions. We worked more than 300 hours on the project. More than the website, we wrote many tutorials and “how to” for our customers. We put the first customers and the complaints started right away. There were many small problems, but without SSH access and no logs, there is no way to solve them or even understand them. I am going to give you some examples: - Some customers reported slow FTP connexions. I tested these from another server (using lftp) and from my office where a I have high speed connexion: lftp xxx@ftp1.ftptoyoursite.com:/www.xxxx.com/web/content> mput * 97792 bytes transferred in 149 seconds (655b/s) Total 2 files transferred For the speed from my office, please look to the attached file. The account I am moving away has 210 Mb files. - PHP mail() function works or not on random basis. It sends emails to some addresses and not to others. I chatted with the support but I was told that they cannot provide logs and they cannot troubleshoot our php scripts. The scripts were moved elsewhere and they work without any modification or troubleshooting. - We wanted to use our DNS but they never provide the various IP addresses. As every service (mySQL, FTP, PHP4 server, PHP5 server, mail…) has its own IP, we had to ping and guess every single IP. However, someday, 1 IP changed for a couple of hours and during this time the websites that relied on this IP were down. In fact, we were supposed to use their own DNS as if we were on a sub entry level reseller hosting. - We experienced about 10 hours of downtime during our first month including 7 hours of maintenance so we cannot sell this hosting to our professional customers. - We created an account 10 days ago, but our customer cannot put any file on his account, he has always a Permission Denied. Connect socket #2592 to x.x.x.x, port 35996... 550 welcome.jpg: Permission denied TYPE A 200 Type set to A PASV We have no logs, no SSH access to check and correct the permissions and the support service wasn’t able to solve the problem. On our servers, such problems are solved in matter of seconds. - On the live support, some techs are competent and some aren’t. We had a problem with an account with a .name domain name and the tech told us that the .name domains are not supported. They are supported and the problem was elsewhere. - On at least 1 website, .htaccess never worked (on an Apache server). So our customer wasn’t able to protect some of his folders and we had to move it to our dedicated. - The system uses PHP 4.3.11 – We have PHP 4.4.2 on our servers and most of our customers developed their websites on PHP 4.4.x Basically, every time we had a problem (and there were too many) we had to move the website to our dedicated to solve it. With a slow FTP and no backup function, it is a very difficult task. Last week, I spent 12 hours to move away manually a website that belong to an important customer (many files and DBs). I think that the people who are behind Mosso must put themselves on our perspective if they want to do business with us. Their hosting system looks great on the paper but it was absolutely unusable for hosting purposes when the tried it. I am very for sorry for that.
Posted by Apolo, 07-21-2006, 01:10 PM
Now, those are very good reasons. Thanks for your time.
Posted by sprintserve, 07-26-2006, 01:01 PM
Yes. I chatted on a couple of ocassions and the lack of a backup function / shell access means there's no real way to automate backups. Which as everyone on WHT will say: "If the site is so important, why didn't you keep your own backups" The answer is that here it will be very difficult. Imagine backing up 40GB 60GB 80GB regularly. It's great marketing speak on their website like another host that has been recently maligned all over here. The marketing guys however are always ahead of real capabilities.
Posted by NameSniper, 07-27-2006, 02:27 PM
If what they promise will be offered at a good level then i guess they have a good chance to develope. Nice websiet design,nice features but the time will show their reliability as with any new provider
Posted by froggerd, 08-19-2006, 08:38 AM
I became a mosso customer and can provide some perspective. One, it is not for pure resellers. If you want an automated front end and custom name servers this is not for you. If you are a designer/developer and host clients, it is a great solution. I did experience some of the stability issues, but they did a big storage upgrade a week or so ago and it has gotten very stable. They still lack SSL, but the founders tell me that is days away. The concept has a ways to go, but for $100 you get a ton and can do a ton. I have Linux and MS sites, lots of email accounts, and it all works very well. I do not have a lot of complex needs, so it is great for me. I am eager to see where this concept goes. In talking to the founders, they have an incredible vision about all this system can do. We will see. So far, for basic hosting for my clients, I prefer it to server + plesk which has been my standard.
Posted by pythonrocks, 08-20-2006, 10:27 PM
You can host several web site on one Mosso package, can't you? (Otherwise it's pricy)
Posted by froggerd, 08-20-2006, 11:00 PM
Unlimited sites (on both MS and Linux) and unlimited email. At least unlimited up to 80GB of storage. Getting both OS options is a real plus.
Posted by froggerd, 08-24-2006, 08:34 AM
Update. New release of CP came out with some good additions: DNS controls, beta SSL, and other clean ups around password controls, etc. Stability has remained very good. There still are some provisioning hiccups every once in a while but they get resolved quickly. I was not around for some of the early troubles, and do not have complex needs, but so far, I am really happy with mosso. Much easier than managing server with plesk.
Posted by domotre, 08-24-2006, 09:39 AM
Froggeerd, is mosso offer your own private nameservers now ?
Posted by froggerd, 08-24-2006, 09:45 PM
Nope. They are a generic name however - stabletransit. I would not expect them soon since they really are not targeting mass resellers. Who knows, I could be wrong. They seem to talk a lot more about rails, advanced mail services, software provisioning and other stuff in their communications about roadmap.
Posted by autodelete, 08-24-2006, 11:01 PM
Besides the bandwidth, storage space and dual technologies, how is this any different from a VPS with fanatical support (sic) say from someone like ServInt? A limited panel is fine if it meets the end user's needs, but the lack of logs or SSH doesn't give developers a lot to work with trying to debug their own script issues on a production site.
Posted by KimHuff, 09-21-2006, 12:30 AM
Well, I just got done reading all 13 pages of this thread. I would like to say thank you to all those that posted here; for a person trying to make a decision it is nice to get helpful info. I am surprised to find that Mosso is still having so many problems. I called today and spoke to Roland who told me that they do have SSL, but there are problems with some certificates. I was told that if the cert requires a user name and password when installing, it may or may not work. Here is my dilemma... I have been with OLM for many years now. I started with one domain... went to nine... then a resellers package and now my own dedicated server. I have become very comfortable over the years with the staff at OLM. Kind of that same feeling Norm had from Cheers.... "You wanna go where everybody knows your name." Unfortunately, not unlike Norm, it's a dog eat dog world out there, and I am wearing milk bone underwear. (Sorry, obvious Cheers fan here!) Recently, things have changed and I have had problems with my server. For some time I have called them telling tech support I thought something strange was going on. I was told it was a problem with my PHP scripts and that I needed to fix that on my end. Long story short, found out there WAS bad stuff going on and unless I hired manage services, there was really nothing they could do to help me... I was even told that they had already helped me too much. I was also told that if my server was going to cause security issues, they would shut it down. I understand the need for this, but when someone has been with a company for an extended amount of time, this was probably not the best customer service way to approach things. As you might have assumed, I would be considered more of a web designer than a hosting company. I have 22 domains on my 80 gb server (all but 6 I maintain the sites myself) and although I do know how to access the root, check the work load, watch the sendmail and move around through the different folders.... that is the extent of my Linux command code knowledge. Needless to say, the Mosso setup might just be the answer to some of my inabilities regarding server management. But, after reading the last several pages, I am more concerned about mosso's ability to serve even my needs. I have several stores on my server... a couple using osCommerce with the rest using Zen-Cart. Some of these sites are big (by my standards) and although never max out of their bandwidth, I need them to be on a secure server. I am a 43 year old mom of two and although I SUCK at math, I am basically a smart person. I really want to learn more about Linux and would like to continue to offer hosting to my clients, which has been picking up a lot these days. It is obvious to me that a true managed server is out of my price range and to fix the problems on my current server we are talking about upgrading me to another server so I can do a clean install of everything from the OS to domains to some of the store scripts. I would like a company that is going to at least notify me if any upgrade is needed (which OLM did not do... keeping me with a version of PHP that had known vulnerabilities), let me know if there is a problem with my server... not just when it is down... and they MUST have 24/7 support since I do a great deal of my work late at night. I currently pay $110 a month for a Celeron box with 2 80gb hard drives, 100 domains, 5 IPs, and a GB of RAM. The upgrade I am considering will mean another $45 a month and although that doesn’t sound like a lot, I think my level of support will soon be decreasing as well. I do have a friend that (I believe) is willing to teach me more about Linux and help me with some of my firewall and security issues. He works for a university and security is one of his jobs on their systems. So, does anyone have any suggestions about which way I should go next? Knowing my “story” and my limited knowledge but willingness to learn, what would some of you suggest? I definitely see my server getting up to 50 domains, but I don’t see it needing more than an 80 gb HD. (Famous last words) I do not like the idea of their being no cron jobs for the backups, which is what I am doing right now on a separate drive. I am used to the Ensim control panel, but I think I can learn cPanel... I have never seen Plesk, so I don’t know what kind of learning curve is involved. I know you are all WAY over my head in terms of knowledge and the hosting world, but I would just like to find a secure way to take care of my clients and a few of my friends websites. Thanks you in advance. (Sorry about the lengthy message) Kim
Posted by Aussie Bob, 09-21-2006, 12:56 AM
A fully managed VPS seems a good fit for for you. It's in your price target, and most VPS's out there are fully managed. You can also have cpanel installed on your VPS. Although you'd be hard pushed to find a VPS offerring 80GB disk space. Do you really need that much disk space?
Posted by KimHuff, 09-21-2006, 03:23 AM
I could probably get by with less. I just recently had the hard drives updated from 20gb drives to 80gb... hoping this would have to be the last upgrade I would have to do in awhile. I only paid about $40 for the labor on that upgrade, but I had hoped it would last longer than a couple months. Actually, I think I used to have a VPS before, but it ended up being cheaper to go with the dedicated and the VPS was terrible slow. Can you suggest any companies? Kim
Posted by autodelete, 09-21-2006, 11:38 AM
I would avoid using a VPS for multiple PHP driven e-commerce sites. Been there, done that, forget it. IMO, it's very hard to find a VPS vendor who doesn't oversell and you can't cut corners on e-commerce sites. If you are looking for proactive support (they monitor your software and update as necessary), you could go with someone like Touch Support (for $50/mth). That's a relatively hands off solution. Layeredtech usually has cheap and fairly reliable dedicated servers for lease. Their latest sale can be read here, http://layer0.layeredtech.com/showthread.php?t=4528
Posted by KimHuff, 09-22-2006, 06:48 PM
Thanks for the input. I would imagine many of the members here are more on the hosting side than the webdesign side. I am curious if there are any other webdesigners out there and if so, how do you handle hosting for your clients? Thanks, Kim
Posted by digitalmark, 09-22-2006, 09:02 PM
I am mostly a designer, partly a developer, and slightly a host, the latter being thanks to Mosso. I considered OLM 5 yrs ago, but went with ciHost. Then their speed started sucking and my paid tech-support began taking hours to pickup. Until I found Mosso last spring. It hasn't been all smiles, but I'd say 90%. I have osCommerce, ZenCart, and other PHP based CMS and project management apps running on my Mosso based services. The $3/mo for 24/7 support for my clients can't be beat (and included free to me as the "manager" of my clients hosting). Because their hybrid clustered technology has it's nuances, they are good about helping to configure websites to work on their site. They are essentially proving that their sytem will beat the alternatives, even though there may be some work on their part. Based on their general performance and support, I'm feeling nearly confident to start some ad campaigns to load some customers under my account. (Currently I'm serving existing design clients.) There are some pseudo-chron alternatives they're currently suggesting, though many of their customers have requested chron jobs. Contact me privately for a trial account (to see it from a client's perspective). Hope this helps.
Posted by layer0, 09-22-2006, 09:17 PM
Unfortunately you can't PM until you have 10 posts (you have 5 right now). I'm very interested in the trial account though. Can you send me an e-mail at info @ elix.us? Thanks,
Posted by digitalmark, 09-22-2006, 09:19 PM
A workaround is to setup a dns such as ns1.yourhost.com and ns2.yourhost.com with your registrar that has MX, CNAME and A records pointed to their infrastructure. This has worked for me so I tell my cleints to set their domain nameservers to my branded dns. Though I call this a hack, it was posted on their forum and info was provided by their techs to make it workable. Recently, they also added DNS controls to the CP, incase you want to have a specific webservice pointed elsewhere.
Posted by digitalmark, 09-22-2006, 09:42 PM
I just sent you a prelim email. I guess meaning ignore others not coming from sm at DMS ;-)
Posted by digitalmark, 10-01-2006, 08:34 PM
From doing the first "trial", I realized that there would be an important aspect to Mosso's CP, features, setup, etc that people would be missing out on. Though I'd like to invite people to try Mosso, this approach would not be favorable.
Posted by eGawish, 10-12-2006, 05:18 PM
the major drawback at mosso is that the admin gotta do everything himself, Clients can't create Subdomains or MySQL databases the admin must be contacted to do it from his control panel. So the client side control panel is nearly useless. If the Clients Side panel contain those functions clients need in the Admin control panel, it can be my best choice. Private Nameservers dont really bother me as they use a universal one which isn't a website name, its just an empty domain if u try to browse through internet browsers.
Posted by Ramprage, 10-13-2006, 11:06 AM
I'm glad to see someone making noise in the industry, good for them. It looks like they've really thought about this solution and it will do well. As we all know, there are way to many hosting providers offering single hard drive, basic servers and slap 1000 clients on them. Time to get some redundant setups that business people can afford and I think they're off in the right direction.
Posted by HoyaSon, 10-17-2006, 09:23 PM
I got on question For $100, what server power do we get basically? I would expect at least to get a dedicated P4 box power with 1G ram though
Posted by Aussie Bob, 10-18-2006, 03:27 AM
I seriously doubt that you're not going to get the equivilant of a P4 with 1GB RAM, with your mosso account. I have no clue how their cluster is structured, but each $100/mth account I can't see being the same as a P4 with 1GB RAM.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 10-18-2006, 03:39 AM
Agreed ! However, assuming they deliver on their promise - you would also not get Multi-Platform Support, HA, etc with a $100 PIV, 1GB RAM server
Posted by spiv, 10-19-2006, 02:30 AM
Ok, just when you thought $100/month was perhaps oversold lowball pricing, Media Temple is apparently jumping on the "grid/cluster" bandwagon. They just announced Grid Server: "We've eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email" http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/ 100Gb of storage 1 TB of bandwidth up to 100 individual sites 100 email accounts $20/month
Posted by froggerd, 10-19-2006, 07:56 AM
There are some major differences between mosso and MT. For one, mosso allows you to resell much more easily. You can create and manage clients and there is an end user control panel. Also, you get MS and Linux technologies. Not to say MT does not have some cool stuff, but mosso is a very different thing. I also think the Rackspace backing will, in the end, be a huge difference for mosso.
Posted by vcore34, 10-19-2006, 08:39 AM
Personally I only need to run a few sites (under 10) and so I think either would be perfect for me. I am trying to compare/contrast the two to figure out which is the best solution for me. Both sound great, in theory, but in practice I am concerned about moving from a dedicated to something that prices $20 or $100 a month, not matter what they say.
Posted by domotre, 10-19-2006, 10:11 AM
20 per month???????????? another overselling tale
Posted by tomyknoker, 10-20-2006, 10:02 AM
Hi All, Ok well have read all the posts and done a fair bit of research, into both (mt) and MOSSO. I've been with (mt) for 5 years now and honestly have always been impressed... I'm just about to launch my hosting company and am very undecided about who to chose... I love the idea of (mt) I think they really are at the forefront, the Gird-Server so far seems fantastic... The problem with my reselling is that I can't resell on the Grid as they don't provide any kind of individual control panel access for Clients that I decide to host websites for... MOSSO seemed great on the surface but then after looking into it further it seems as though it's not as detailed as MediaTemple in regards to options on the control panel... I think more and more clients want alot more access to there server space, MOSSO has great options like looking after my clients billing, but I'd still have to manually enter the billing details... If I had to chose I'd pick (mt) but then here's the dilemma... On the (mt) Grid Server no client access (really), so is it worth opening up a Dedicated Virtual account with (mt)?? This seems to be a good option as you get Plesk V8 and have full access... the worry for me I guess is it's not The Grid! So would the service be not as good? Would my clients suffer? With MOSSO they have a Grid type system, but honestly for me there web site runs very slowly and if that's an indication of the service I guess I should be worried... What is everyone's opinion on opening up a Dedicated Virtual server with MediaTemple? Am I wasting my money by using older technology? Would love everyone's opinions...
Posted by americantechie, 10-21-2006, 04:37 AM
I am in the same position. I run sites for clients so they do not need the control panel access. I am comparing the two and my biggest problem with MT is that you cannot get multiple IP addresses. That means you can only run one e-commerce site per account. This would not work for serious hosting. Another problem is that you only get one MySQL user with MT which is really lame. If one of the sites has a security breach and the MySQL information is exposed then you would have to bring down all of your dynamic sites to change the MySQL password.
Posted by FIAHOST, 10-21-2006, 07:03 AM
When I had an account with Mosso my problem was that the SSH access wasn't allowed. There was no access to the logs too. If one of your customers has a problem, you can't assist him because you have the same privileges as him.
Posted by froggerd, 10-21-2006, 12:45 PM
While this is true, the real misleading part is that it is almost impossible to resell or manage clients - the real purpose of the mosso system. So, actually using the resources is pretty tough at MT. All this said, all these new platforms are great for hosting. I am happy with mosso, but glad other companies will push them to improve.
Posted by Apolo, 10-21-2006, 08:27 PM
I wonder if they won't help with this. I mean, most managed dedicated server providers will be able to search the logs for you.
Posted by FIAHOST, 10-22-2006, 05:43 AM
They don't support such issues. Basically, if one of your customers ends with an error message or a bad CHOWN, you can't do anything for that.
Posted by layer0, 10-22-2006, 08:33 AM
MediaTemple is all hype. If you want to get a VPS / "Dedicated Virtual" just skip the hype and get in touch with knownhost.com
Posted by Apolo, 10-22-2006, 02:30 PM
What a bad thing then...
Posted by froggerd, 10-22-2006, 04:29 PM
Not sure I understand all this. They will fully support all issues you have. There are no restrictions to support if you as the account holder contact them. They charge extra if you want your customers to contact them directly. I actually would say the support is excellent. Live chat 24x7. I have never had a wait.
Posted by Apolo, 10-22-2006, 05:53 PM
And I don't understand why you quoted my comment. It was edelweisshosting, who actually had experience with them the one saying this: If your experience with them has been different, then good for you.
Posted by froggerd, 10-26-2006, 09:13 AM
Bad quote, Apolo, apologies. I have just found the support to be great. Chat, available instantly, 24x7. Nice change from ticketing systems in my mind.
Posted by Apolo, 10-26-2006, 10:32 AM
No problem. By the way, did you have any dedicated server(s) before going Mosso?
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 10-26-2006, 12:10 PM
From http://www.mosso.com/pricing.jsp Bandwidth Overages Note: You can opt to allow or prohibit bandwidth overages for each of your hosted websites. You are only charged overage fees from Mosso when your sites collectively use more than 2,000 GB of bandwidth per month. $3.00 / GB over
Posted by FIAHOST, 10-26-2006, 02:38 PM
Even if their techs are allways available, most of them don't have root access to the hosting system I assume. They support you if you don't know how to use any feature but they can't read the logs for you nor perform any SSH command on you behalf.
Posted by vcore34, 10-26-2006, 02:47 PM
sorry, but why wouldn't the tech supporters have root access? If this was the case something very simple, like a corrupted database, could cause a serious outage, correct?
Posted by froggerd, 10-26-2006, 10:38 PM
Yes. Used plesk.
Posted by Ryan Williams, 10-26-2006, 11:13 PM
Contacted Mosso about the bandwidth overage prices. Might interest some:
Posted by grabmail, 12-02-2006, 06:51 AM
wow. No posts about mosso lately. Must be humming alone nicely. No more outages?
Posted by froggerd, 12-02-2006, 10:43 AM
Been very solid. I am loving it. They need to add features for sure. But client management is pretty good; linux and MS technoogies. Good start. Interesting how quiet they are vs. someone like MT. Seems to me they are quietly building something pretty impressive. I hope to never go back to dedicated.
Posted by grabmail, 12-02-2006, 02:18 PM
How do you upgrade? I mean, if you know you consistently use 4000 GB of bandwidth every month, can you order 2 packages and have access to 4000 GB of bandwidth instead of paying $3 per GB of bandwidth overage after 2000 GB. Any of the weird problems mentioned earlier?
Posted by A|J, 12-02-2006, 02:30 PM
Haven't had much major issues with Mosso. Just minor bugs that i've been experiencing. I'm going to write a review on Mosso once i've been with them for three months. Stay tuned
Posted by Ryan Williams, 12-02-2006, 04:30 PM
grabmail, see my post just above about having multiple accounts. Mosso have no problems with it, but obviously it's more of a headache to keep track of things over multiple accounts and of course you'd have problems if a specific site on one of them used up the majority of the bandwidth for some reason. Unless you have your own system for mirroring the site onto both accounts anyway, and can switch them across if need be.
Posted by grabmail, 12-03-2006, 07:35 AM
wow. that sucks. You mean you have to spread the load among the 2 accounts yourself? Mosso can't just allocate you double the resources when you order 2 package?
Posted by froggerd, 12-03-2006, 10:25 AM
You can keep everything on one account, you just pay the overage amounts. I bet if you called them and tried to work out a deal, they might adjust things on the overages. Either way it has to be cheaper than most dedicated shops.
Posted by A|J, 12-03-2006, 10:48 AM
What could potentially be done, if you have one site that causes the problems is to host the graphics and media etc on a separate sub domain, and host that separate sub domain on a second mosso account.
Posted by HeavyEddie, 12-08-2006, 08:45 AM
As someone who is about to go with a dedicated host... I almost wish I didn't start reading this thread. I was ready to take on all the headaches associated with a dedicated host. When I chatted with them last night it seems there isn't any real backup solution though! I mean they backup the entire grid, but they can't restore individual sites in the event of corruption. Without cron, you can't really setup an automated task either.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 12-08-2006, 10:42 AM
If you are stuck with this decision, then may I ask why you don't just use a shared host? Find one that doesn't oversell and has a high-quality of service; the host's responsability is to manage the infrastructure, yours is to run your website or application. Kind Regards,
Posted by HeavyEddie, 12-08-2006, 02:43 PM
To be honest, I feel like a jilted lover. I've used many shared hosts over the years and they always start out wonderful. The servers eventually get get oversold and I'm left with frustrated customers. I guess I have no real reason to think Mosso would be any different. I would love to truly partner with a company for the long term and don't mind spending a few extra dollars for that security. I agree with your statement though... I would prefer to leave the infrastructure up to the professionals and I will run the websites. Which is really what Mosso is offering.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 12-08-2006, 03:09 PM
I whloeheatedly agree. Finding reliable strategic partners is one of the most difficult things to do. It is also refreshing to hear someone say they do not mind paying more for better service, in a way it validates my team just a bit.... Kind Regards,
Posted by grabmail, 12-08-2006, 03:49 PM
so are you or are you not going to try mosso? if you are, do post ur experiences here
Posted by pueblosnet, 12-10-2006, 01:55 PM
mosso: if you read this, think in spanish users! thanks.
Posted by swoop, 12-12-2006, 04:28 PM
At Mosso, you don't get to run cron jobs. Big bummer. No data backup method from their control panel. Lots of minor negatives, but they are headaches, nevertheless. I have a short laundry list of headaches from Mosso, but nothing to stab a dagger into oneself and say "kill me now and spare me the pain." As long as your site and db stay up and running under reasonably high loads, that's all that ultimately matters.
Posted by evolv, 12-12-2006, 07:19 PM
I currently had a large dedicated hosting account and a few large clients that supported the cost. Those large clients have now gone to their own dedicated servers leaving me with only a handful of small clients, so naturally I wanted a new - cheaper solution. I signed on with Mosso November 15th. All my sites are transferred and for the most part all were successful transfers. I say for the most part because as with anything, some glithces do happen. My experiences with Mosso so far are; 1. Very good customer response (chat is always fast) (phone calls are usualy fast but one took up to 15 minutes to get answered.) 2. Sometimes their servers seem slow, maybe due in part to that fact that everything on the sites are on different clusters. 3. SSL is enabled and a quick chat or phone call and they will tell you how to access and enable it. Additional cost to enable it. 4. There is no SSH, so no cron jobs and no taking back of file permissions. They told me that a new admin panel will be coming shortly and it will have file permission control and there will be a future change which will allow cron jobs. 5. E-mail troubles are plenty. From mail not appearing for hours to logins failing. Ofcourse when you call them about it they tell you that everything is running normally. I am expecting a phone call back tomorrow about an e-mail issue. 6. The website packages offered to clients cannot be changed once enabled but they tell me that the next panel change will allow for it. Now that I have had almost a month of exposure to the system over all it is not bad. One feature I would really like to see installed yesterday is Cron-Job, I can live without SSH if I can get control of the file permissions and if I want that I call support and they fix it up for me. Overall 7 out of 10 IMOH My dedicated with Plesk was much better atleast a 9 out of 10
Posted by drewnick, 12-12-2006, 09:10 PM
I also had the exact same problems from the following post: The e-mail is particularly bothersome, but the slow site sucks too. I've managed a lot of servers, so I'm not the target client. I wanted something to handle load, and this "system" seems to be weak at handling a tiny site with 5 visitors a day. My external monitor showed my site being down about 10% of the day. Drew
Posted by swoop, 12-12-2006, 10:17 PM
I haven't noticed slowness. What type of site are you running? Ones that use database access, like blogs and discussion forums?
Posted by swoop, 12-12-2006, 10:19 PM
Can you post some stats of the external monitor showing the site being down 10% of the day? I'm curious to see how bad it is. I haven't put my site on an external monitor, yet.
Posted by swoop, 12-12-2006, 10:52 PM
Have you guys noticed also that the Mosso control panel response slowly?
Posted by drewnick, 12-12-2006, 11:25 PM
Joomla site I'm running - I am using IPCheck. I went into a 2 hour meeting and came out with 150 alerts - I was panicking and then realized it was a Mosso issue causing the site to not load at all due to database errors - on Mosso's end. Drew
Posted by Jeff321, 12-13-2006, 12:03 AM
Anybody have an experience running a large web forum on Mosso? I'm looking for somewhere to host a vBulletin that has hundreds of active users simultaneously. It doesn't use much disk space or bandwidth, but makes tons of MySQL connections/queries and sends out lots of emails. Mosso may not be intended to be used like this, but their website certainly makes it sound like their system can handle the load.
Posted by drewnick, 12-13-2006, 12:06 AM
I agree that their marketing team thinks it can do it. Based on my experience with Joomla at Mosso, I'd say stick with a more traditional clustering approach for what you have going on, especially if you care about your users.
Posted by Jeff321, 12-13-2006, 12:11 AM
It's currently on a dedicated box but it can't handle the load during peak times, so I've been looking at more advanced dedicated setups or clustering that stay within my budget. Not an easy task. Mosso looked good at first until I did more research and found reviews like in this thread.
Posted by grabmail, 12-13-2006, 08:10 AM
woa. thanks for the reviews. i shall avoid mosso for the time being. Seems like all these fancy pancy grid/clusty offerings are not production ready yet.
Posted by mrzippy, 12-13-2006, 08:13 AM
They'll mature as time goes on... just like "vitualization" (VPS) technology did. In a few years, grid/cluster software will be much more stable and feature-complete.
Posted by drewnick, 12-13-2006, 09:37 AM
I'd also say Mosso's methods are one of the more promising / well implemented systems. It's essentially a standard load balanced environment, which is pretty time tested. The problem is, when you throw shared hosting on one of these things, it acts differently than it would with a single site.
Posted by swoop, 12-13-2006, 12:56 PM
What type of database errors were these? Could you describe them please? I'm very curious about what they also said to you regarding a solution to it.
Posted by froggerd, 12-15-2006, 11:39 AM
Updates to control panel pushed last night. SSL now incorporated. More flexibility to edit client plans. Some other good changes. I have not looked through it all yet, but seems like good progress happening. Here is the list from their notice: * A new version of our provisioning system. Users should see fewer errors when adding sites, email accounts, and databases. * New Change Plan option on the General Settings page. Provides the ability to easily modify the plans and features associated with any site. * Speed improvements. A new archiving system we've built should begin to make the control panel respond faster and faster over the next few weeks. We're also doing a major upgrade to the database software, which should provide another noticeable speed boost. * SSL option. You can now elect to enable SSL encryption for your websites and install SSL certificates right through the control panel. * IE 7 update. The control panel interfaces will now display properly in IE 7. * Improved password security. Passwords are now not displayed as bullets until you opt to reveal them. * Improved client billing. Fixed many outstanding issues with our client billing software. * Hundreds of other bug fixes and improvements.
Posted by ItBroker, 12-18-2006, 11:38 AM
In your opinion, which one is better for a phpbb+mysql and 100-200 concurrent users.. Mosso.com or a pentium4 2.8ghz 1gb ram dedicated server?
Posted by LiamG, 12-18-2006, 07:47 PM
I've used Mosso for the past 5 months or so and I would say the dedicated server would be better if DB performance is more important compared the other features at Mosso. I dont host a forum as such but my sites do rely on the DB. The MySQL speed at Mosso was fantastic to begin with but I have seen a definate performance drop over the months. The queries per second (in phpMyAdmin) is certainly going up every month. Another reason I would recommend a dedicated server is they have restricted one of my sites for too much DB use without any notification (not delayed, just none). They specifically stated at the start that they had no such restrictions and so they could not give me any quotas to be sure I stayed under. I understand the need to limit people with too much traffic, but its a bit rich to state otherwise and not give you any info on what is considered "too much". Promised follow ups from my "account manager" also never happened. They do also offer MSSQL databases for an additional fee, but I have no experiance with those. I'd assume they are faster as less people would be using them. Hope this helps, Liam
Posted by ItBroker, 12-18-2006, 08:14 PM
Thank you, Liam. In your opinion, around how many concurrent users in a phpbb+mysql can stay with no problem in mosso.com 100$ offer? 100? 200?
Posted by swoop, 12-18-2006, 08:59 PM
It would be a major concern if they just don't provide notice when they cut you off. Further, to not tell you what is the expected cut-off. So, basically, you're going to get about $100 worth of scalability. No more than that. Sure, they'll let you serve as many web pages as you can, but when it comes to database usage, there are limits. Does this sum up the plan. (btw-- I have an account opened with them, but I haven't stressed the DB, yet.)
Posted by ItBroker, 12-19-2006, 03:08 AM
If they don't allow much mysql usage, then I will not transfer there my forum. Thank you for your informations guys.
Posted by drewnick, 12-19-2006, 09:26 AM
FWIW, I have some fairly heavy DB users over there and haven't had any problems with being cut off yet. They are running oscommerce.
Posted by swoop, 12-19-2006, 12:41 PM
That's interesting to hear. I'm glad this forum has a lot of perspectives from actual users of the service. When you say heavy DB users on oscommerce, what type of traffic and queries per second do you see? I'm curious to know what heavy DB use means.
Posted by drewnick, 12-19-2006, 12:52 PM
They push 60GB per month, but I have no idea of how many queries per second. Any way I can find that out? In my mind, 60GB is a lot of pageviews.
Posted by LiamG, 12-19-2006, 08:37 PM
I would add that while I have had some DB dramas, I must say the support people you deal with are fantastic. I'm in a different time zone to the US and it is good to always be able to get someone on the live chat 24x7. They can't always close the issue right there but at least you can get the process started.
Posted by ItBroker, 12-20-2006, 01:16 PM
Yes, 60gb must be a lot of pageviews.. but I still don't know if they would be ok for a phpbb with 150-200 users logged together at peak hours.
Posted by Ryan Williams, 12-20-2006, 04:44 PM
I think the best way to find out would be to see if you can get in touch with their highest volume customers (forums, etc). For example these super busy vBulletin forums that were mentioned earlier in the thread.
Posted by ItBroker, 12-20-2006, 05:00 PM
Very wise, Ryan. I will ask mosso.com support if they can give me some URLs of the biggest forum hosted with them.
Posted by swoop, 12-20-2006, 06:32 PM
Let us all know if you can. I'm a client of theirs, too. But rather than all hit them at the same time with the same question, maybe one of us can ask and post.
Posted by swoop, 12-21-2006, 09:48 AM
From their acceptable use policy: "You may not use the Services in a way that consumes a disproportionate amount of system resources. For example, you may not distribute software to the public, provide a public file download Services or employ programs that consume excessive CPU capacity. Mosso may suspend or terminate your Services for violation of this provision in addition to requiring you to pay Overage Fees as described in the Terms of Service. " I think Mosso intends for most of its users to be average websites, with serving HTML and well mannered/simple PHP scripts with moderate DB activity. However, they also state this in their FAQ: " Mosso will never suspend a site as long as the traffic is legitimate and the hosted content doesn’t violate our TOS or our AUP. As a company, we succeed when you succeed so we will always encourage legitimate traffic to your sites. We have several domains on The Hosting System that receive millions of hits each month. We have never limited or throttled their accounts – that’s part of the benefit of going with an offering like Mosso. On the other side of the coin, we will stop any illegitimate spikes in traffic. For instance, runaway scripts or DDOS attacks, etc." Has anyone experienced anything different?
Posted by froggerd, 12-21-2006, 09:59 AM
While not a forum, here is a blog that has a powered by mosso logo: http://uneasysilence.com/ From looking at alexa, looks like it is pretty busy and has some spikes. Its pretty good reading too!
Posted by swoop, 12-21-2006, 03:09 PM
The control panel is still very slow. It was suppose to speed up, but I often wait minutes for a response from it after clicking a submit button.
Posted by ItBroker, 12-24-2006, 11:38 AM
They didn't told me the URLs of their biggest forum.
Posted by mrzippy, 12-24-2006, 11:40 AM
And I doubt they ever will.. since it would probably break their privacy policy. Do you advertise the names of *your* clients?
Posted by ItBroker, 12-24-2006, 11:55 AM
I would ask my client if it is ok for him
Posted by froggerd, 12-31-2006, 06:39 PM
Came across this review. Similar to my experience. Things are pretty darn good at mosso right now. Still need a few mail features, ruby and other minor stuff. But, I think I am done with plesk forever. http://www.twod.co.uk/2006/12/30/pro...fect-web-host/
Posted by grabmail, 12-31-2006, 07:31 PM
no cron job? out of the question.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 12-31-2006, 07:37 PM
every webhost says this - the TOS/AUP/other policy document is where the rediculous limits and restictions are kept. Do they allow hosting of mp3s/podcasts/media?
Posted by swoop, 12-31-2006, 11:02 PM
No Cron job is a major bummer. It almost made me (and still making me) rethink being with Mosso.
Posted by froggerd, 01-01-2007, 10:07 AM
Have you gotten any feedback as to when it is on the roadmap?
Posted by daniel-ceo, 01-01-2007, 02:09 PM
I am sure it is only a matter of time. Their growth path seems to be steady.
Posted by netspots, 01-02-2007, 12:53 PM
So... what's the bottom line on Mosso? Thumbs up? Or thumbs down?
Posted by cphaynes, 01-02-2007, 06:55 PM
That will depend on the needs of person to person. A thumb up for me, might not be a thumb up for you.
Posted by drakazz, 01-02-2007, 06:59 PM
This thread...will never die
Posted by Alystair, 01-05-2007, 11:53 AM
I just canceled my account with Mosso. It was NOT their problem, simply a budget issue. Once I have the funds we will definitely return to them. Over time they have been adding features and their support options have always been good (except for requests regarding additional pear modules). SSL and a few other features were just added, as well making the CP snappier (it was a bit slow in the past). Overall, thumbs WAY WAY up. They don't have the true technical support response time that DEHE had before being bought out, but they do get someone on the job and there is always someone to speak to.
Posted by froggerd, 01-06-2007, 11:20 AM
I have posted my review many times, but if you do some blog searches you will see others really starting to praise mosso. Their utility backend has been very very stable over the last few months, the pace of feature change has been good, the support is always there, and the tools for designers/developers are great. It is so darn simple to use. Overall, very very strong.
Posted by froggerd, 01-25-2007, 12:05 AM
another review on mosso. not just me who is happy. this guy sums it up pretty well: http://jhuskisson.com/
Posted by swoop, 01-25-2007, 10:59 AM
I hate to give a good review because it will only cause them to put too many other guys and gals on their servers. I'm too selfish, I guess, with my desire to have them all to myself ;-) j/k
Posted by HostGuy70, 02-07-2007, 01:35 PM
Mosso has had MAJOR downtime these past few days. (Feb. 6-7) Many of our sites have been down for over a day and we're losing business by the hour. It's unbelieveable how long it's taking them to fix this. Their 100% uptime SLA is totally worthless in my opinion. If you need reliability do NOT choose Mosso. You will be extremely disappointed. Note: This is my first post and I'm usually way too busy to bother with forum posting but, in this case, I felt strongly that people need to be warned. My company spent way too much time moving our sites to Mosso and now we have to find another host (a HUGE hassle given the number of sites we manage). Last edited by HostGuy70; 02-07-2007 at 01:39 PM.
Posted by drewnick, 02-07-2007, 02:07 PM
They are actually down at the moment on the Windows side. Linux is up and down for weeks.
Posted by Ryan Williams, 02-07-2007, 08:19 PM
Ouch. Not good for their ability to boast uptime, which I think has largely been stellar in the past.
Posted by grabmail, 02-08-2007, 06:31 AM
Any systems that doesn't allow cron jobs is NOT production ready. NEXT!
Posted by premium20, 02-08-2007, 09:59 AM
Did not expect this from Mosso. I guess, they are still having problems with their clusters.
Posted by swoop, 02-10-2007, 11:58 PM
It's so very unfortunate because to be on Mosso, you have to do a bit of workaround and redesign of your site for small (but important) issues, such as Cron Jobs and shell execution of scripts. For the added work-arounds for anything more sophisticated than normal HTML pages, wordpress blog or mambo site, not having uptime is a real killer. You spent time, money and effort bending your site and software to the Mosso system, yet uptime is a problem? What would be the real downer is if you become successful with your site with higher amounts of traffic, say 10 to 20 million page views a month, and they cut you off way before that. You spend all this effort redesigning and getting your software to be customized for Mosso (so it would be hard to move it to another host), then they experience extended downtime or cut you off if you are very successful with the traffic on your site. However, you really have to consider also if the grass is greener elsewhere. Is it really better to run and manage your sites on your own dedicated cluster? I know most people want zero downtime, but even with your own dedicated clusters, a truly redundant and high availability system is much, much more expensive than what Mosso charges you. And you will have to pay to have that dedicated cluster managed (even if you yourself manage it, your time is money).
Posted by swoop, 02-11-2007, 12:12 AM
Yes, but they are honest with the problems, keep you informed and do solve the problem. However, that said, they should really be more pro-active and sending email to clients regarding system changes, network status and current capacity limits. For all we know, they can be running their clients on a cluster that is no better than a handful of HSphere managed servers with thousands of client accounts on them. When they say that they have doubled capacity (as they have recently), it could mean they added 5 servers, 10 servers... but who knows? They don't give that information out because it's proprietary. To me, proprietary means they don't want you to know how much they oversell. The other problem is that when they try to expand their entire cluster, they may constantly risk downtime because they are upgrading the entire system. I kind of cross my fingers if I hear they are adding capacity. Who knows what domino effects they can experience when they make changes across their "clusters." I think that is what happened in this latest period of downtime. Still, 100% uptime, seems impossible for any shared host (maybe with more maturity in a few years). What many seek with a Mosso host is the ability to scale up to spikes in traffic without a large amount of initial outlay of prices. Otherwise, a HSphere type cluster for web hosting or dedicated boxes seem to be a better way to go, right? I know I choose Mosso because of their "scalability" for traffic proposition.
Posted by swoop, 02-11-2007, 12:19 AM
I really find this to be a hassle. They have it as one priority they want to solve. However, all the little hassles add up to be a big ball of unpleasantness. Enough to make you take a deep breath and ask, should I be here at Mosso. But, then you start looking for another host, and think, is it better elsewhere? Please, someone give a better solution than Mosso right now. Complain and comment, but can you find a better solution?
Posted by grabmail, 02-11-2007, 01:47 PM
There is gridlayer? VPS?
Posted by berlin, 02-16-2007, 04:44 AM
elasticlive.com runs in AMAZON.com facility. 1,000 times more powerful than mosso which probably runs in only 15 or so servers.
Posted by froggerd, 02-17-2007, 10:48 AM
Amazon has had its own problems. Do not kid yourself. They do not even have an SLA. While mosso has had some issues, I have found it very reliable. And usable. Overall, I am a big fan.
Posted by Apolo, 02-17-2007, 12:50 PM
Would you mind to mention (if you know, of course ) whether they honor their SLA even if a portion of the service is down? Like the Windows part, or FTP service, etc. Thanks.
Posted by berlin, 02-18-2007, 05:16 AM
It's still in Beta. In 3 years Amazon will change the hosting business. I'm sure Google and Yahoo will jump in the elastic cloud bandwagon.
Posted by cristibighea, 02-18-2007, 11:47 AM
What about databases and support for programming languages?
Posted by froggerd, 02-18-2007, 10:01 PM
Yes. They are incredibly responsive to any customer issue.
Posted by Dempy, 03-12-2007, 03:59 AM
I just need to know one thing .. whether there are any problems while sending and receiving emails? ... person can relay on there email services or not ? i don't care about database or programing languages
Posted by premium20, 03-12-2007, 07:56 AM
Did you ask their presales? I find that Mosso presales guys are quite honest and upright in stating things. I have no experience on their support levels though.
Posted by ak7861, 03-20-2007, 02:44 AM
Mosso has great potential. I moved from dedicated to cluster. No issues so far.
Posted by berlin, 03-21-2007, 04:57 PM
how long ago? please keep us updated.
Posted by ak7861, 03-21-2007, 09:12 PM
Been a week now and only one issue has not been resolved. All mail from the site goes into spam for everyone. Support says its because of adding a new barracuda and the issue would be resolved by today. I do have many suggestions for Mosso, some have already been listed here in this thread. One, they should make phpMyAdmin easier to access. Two, they should provide password protection under their control panel for folders. Currently, you have to use htaccess commands. Three, I had to chmod my rss cache folders to 777 compared to 775 on the dedicated. Oh well, at least I get better speed and uptime.
Posted by swoop, 03-21-2007, 10:18 PM
Big disaster at Mosso for two weeks now. Jury is still out.
Posted by Apolo, 03-21-2007, 10:45 PM
Would you mind to be a little bit more descriptive?
Posted by swoop, 03-22-2007, 12:02 AM
15 to 30 seconds load times, at times reaching above this threshold. Better this week, but it was bad the previous week. email problems the last three+ days. No one was getting mail because email servers couldn't handle the spam processing. capacity upgrades bogged down the entire system and many had no sql connection or webserver availability. mysql type sites still slower than on a VPS or dedicated. Don't expect mysql driven sites to be better than 5 seconds for pages to process on the server. provisioning system was down for days. there are many more issues, but these are the most urgent. I'm very surprised other clients have not talked at all about mosso here. But their forums are filled with unhappy users. I'll probably be thrown off now that I've opened my mouth, but it's the truth. On the good side, mosso's crew provides better than average support, though lately, you can see in their forums that their responsiveness and openess has deteriorated. Don't know if this is because of their efforts fighting server system wild fires, or the criticism by users have been too big of a tidal wave. They are helpful for small code issues and getting your stuff to work on their clusters (though this is in part because you need to do some customization work for all but the simplest or most popular web applications and scripts). I'm sure there are lots of Mosso defenders that will flame me for this review. But you can bet there are other Mosso users who have some choice words to use about their experience there. I think this is pretty honest as a warning. You must be very forgiving of Mosso to be there. Maybe this post will light a fire under them because within their own forums, they may not care since they aren't losing new business; they are just losing old business that is beyond the point of repair in faith in "the System." PM me for more info if you like. But I'll leave it at this. Last edited by swoop; 03-22-2007 at 12:15 AM.
Posted by swoop, 03-22-2007, 12:07 AM
You have a totally different experience than most people on the Mosso forums. For the past week it's been terrible for many. I guess you missed the webserver and mysql downtime right before the email problems this week. You lucked out. Maybe Mosso has fixed the problems, but as I hear from others who have been there longer than I have, don't be so sure. It seems to run well for a long period of time, then something goes wrong system-wide. Though this may be unfair- I think I am in the middle ground of opinion on Mosso. Some are big defenders of Mosso; others are very livid right now. I am very surprised that almost no one has aired the dirty laundry here. But the Mosso forums are very frank in their criticism of the past two weeks of unstable hosting.
Posted by ak7861, 03-22-2007, 12:29 PM
Maybe I was but I strongly believe they will improve for the better gradually. That's all what counts to me.
Posted by swoop, 03-27-2007, 02:56 PM
I noticed that a number of long-time users (1 year+) who have dealt with multiple cycles of problems are leaving now. Like you, they were hopeful, forgiving and had a strong sense of faith (however misplaced or uninformed that faith is/was). Finally, they all came to the conclusion that "all that counts to them" is that the "coolness" of the "technology" doesn't make business sense to them if they can't run their business on them. They just lost too much money, time and good-will of their clients to stay. And these guys were some of the strongest supporters of Mosso; I'd say many times stronger than your endorsement. But they slowly were worn down by being upset with issues and lack of changes. Your short time there is a small glimpse of their entire experience. My own developers, in house or out-sourced, all cheered like V-Day when I switched over to a dedicated server. I had comments like: "anything but Mosso, thank you." "About time." "I was about to quit if you stayed with them." If you're going there, your software should be very standard, such as Wordpress. And there is barely a FAQ on their system's differences compared to standard hosting. The reason I even want to write anything here is that I went over to Mosso because of reading these forums, but they did not accurately reflect the inside going-ons of users and Mosso's own forums. Their forums are filled with unhappy guys for all sorts of reasons, whether temporary downtime or just a lack of important features. Sure, there are cheerleaders of Mosso on their forums, too. But those guys didn't lose any real clients or business due to Mosso recent and recurring problems. Take what I say as just one review. Toss it if you like. But I wanted to give you a better story than people who say, "Mosso is the greatest." They are definitely better than many (especially with service-- though communication has not been as strong the last few weeks), but they are far from the best. There is a place for Mosso, but not for resellers and definitely not for developers of more complex web sites or software. Ok, I'll shut up now. Said my peace. You can go and wed thy Mosso if you like.
Posted by Archbob, 03-27-2007, 05:57 PM
I got the impression that your basically buying a large shared account from them for $100/month. I doubt I'll be moving to them from my server anytime soon.
Posted by swoop, 03-28-2007, 10:02 AM
It's more than just a large shared server. They likely can handle a fair amount of traffic for you. To give Mosso a fair shake, they do help you a lot and care about their service. These growing pains, however, really are a concern for companies which rely on the website for their revenue or business transactions. For mission critical or mission-important sites, you must run your own server or have a very solid shared host. What Mosso is good for, in my opinion, and one reason I would stay with them for the long term, is to host non-mission critical sites that you would like the ability to scale up in traffic or particular bursts, such as the slashdot/digg effect. Once, you get to a scale that Mosso says they can't support you, you will have enough ad revenue or such to go to a much larger setup anyway. If they can eliminate the email problems (which they have, I think because they have recently switched to webmail.us as their provider of email instead of handling it in-house) and find a good solution for mysql and mssql, then they are on their way to being "the" host. You will, however, until they figure out how to engineer their cluster architecture to support it, be without Cron jobs, a good reseller interface, single user FTP accounts, etc. Companies with mostly HTML static pages, or websites that are mostly cached web pages generated from a DB will fare much better on Mosso. In fact, I think these people will have very few problems with Mosso, and will benefit from being able to scale up to larger bursts of traffic. I didn't want to leave people with an impression that Mosso was a bad place to host. It's just that these forums, especially lately, have been so glowingly smitten with Mosso that people should be warned that it's not the smoothest sailing. It may be in the future, but it's hasn't been lately. I think the founders and employees at Mosso are very level headed. They take most criticism very seriously, but never take it personally. It is a very good sign. I also think they are at a stage where they don't want new clients to come onto their system with unrealistic expectations. Yes, the old "marketing" vs. "reality" syndrome. Don't get pulled in by all the marketing hype... discount the hype by more than 50% and you will be pleasantly surprised. Go in with too high an expectation, and you'll leave there in a week.
Posted by servand, 03-28-2007, 10:28 AM
But, with 2000GB/mo for the entire account, you're not going to last long before you get to paying $3/gb when hit by /. Others have also indicated that they will cut you off for having too much processor activity, so even if your site isn't bandwidth intensive but instead, say, generates from a PHP script on a MySQL database, the load from a /. posting could easily trigger a cutoff.
Posted by swoop, 03-28-2007, 10:56 AM
That's up to 10 million normal web pages, depending on the size of your web pages. I'm doubtful that /. or digg could generate that immediately to take out 2TB. I'm doubtful that anyone at Mosso is using up their 2TB and still there. But I agree that processor activity would be capped. No sane host would allow unlimited processor activity anyway. That would be a DOS nightmare that could take down the whole system for all clients. The problems with MySQL are, in my opinion, related also to the impossibility of optimizing the mysql db for your application. Whereas a big site like Yahoo could optimize their mysql clusters to a single application, mosso must run their mysql clusters for thousands of clients running all sorts of databases with all sorts of optimization needs. It can't be perfect for anyone, and thus imperfect for everyone. This is not Mosso's fault, but the nature of trying to give a shared mysql cluster to all users. But one thing I do know is that they haven't capped the memory allocation to scripts, yet. You could run scripts that allocate 128M, 256M or more if they aren't used much. And yes, they do monitor your site's activity so it doesn't impact other sites or tax the entire system too much.
Posted by Archbob, 03-28-2007, 12:23 PM
Mosso would be pretty good for generic sites, however for serious web developers they lack the flexibility and customization of an actual server.
Posted by ak7861, 03-28-2007, 08:40 PM
I'm still testing my sites on Mosso. Will post an update soon. On an average, I take about 1500 gigs bandwidth a month.
Posted by ak7861, 04-02-2007, 07:19 PM
Unfortunately Mosso's control panel has ticked me off. Only client accounts may receive ftp access and if I were to move a domain from the root to a client I would have to delete all of it's content. Ouch.
Posted by ak7861, 04-04-2007, 01:38 AM
Hi Guys. I decided to move from Mosso to Media Temple. Compared to Mosso, the control panel has a lot more features and services. I have also noticed that the speed is better on Media Temple.
Posted by Archbob, 04-04-2007, 04:13 PM
MT's setup is similiar to Mosso's and they have similar problems. I'd say avoid the grid setups until they stabalize.
Posted by berlin, 04-05-2007, 11:16 AM
anyone tried servage.net?
Posted by Archbob, 04-05-2007, 11:48 AM
Servage's setup is not as complex as Mosso's . They can't offer you ASP.NET and PHP at the same time for instance.
Posted by MrRadic, 04-05-2007, 01:40 PM
MT's setup isn't a grid.
Posted by Archbob, 04-07-2007, 03:22 AM
Why do they call it a gridserver then?
Posted by ukrossco, 04-24-2007, 12:14 AM
Hi Folks Just going to drop my two pence in (translation - two cents worth - I'm British!). I, like a lot of people, was sold by the promises of the Mosso marketing. I mean it sounds too good to be true - the power of a server without having to worry about actually owning and administrating one - but my experience almost a month in has been pretty poor. First of all there's the control panel. It really couldn't be any slower... As a really rough measure, I used a firefox extension to measure load time and visited the page using the browser first to make sure dns was cached - here are some results (keep in mind I'm on 8M broadband in the UK, although my ping time to mosso is 200ms on average) Login Page - manage.mosso.com - 2750ms Welcome page (after logging in) - 3870ms Selecting my website list - 3909ms Selecting a website in the list - 8917ms Clicking on the features tab (takes you to MySQL/PHP/IIS that sort of thing) - 15411ms Not very scientific but gives you an impression of how tedious it is to do anything with the control panel. I added 15 or so domains and it took me a day and several thousands cups of tea (remember, I'm British). And remember the control panel has really poor breadcrumbs so you spend a lot of your time navigating and not really accomplishing much. The second problem with the control panel is that the actions its processes sets off in the background don't have any kind of scheduling attached. Let me give you an example: if you mess up creating a domain and want to delete it and create it from scratch, you would think that doing this from the control panel would be easy... it is! What you don't know is that those fresh dns entries you created are about to be deleted as part of the domain deletion process that is taking so long to complete you have beaten it. Then you go and check your dns and see that half the entries are missing... You wait a bit, thinking that maybe the creation process was slow... You wait a bit more... There's a lot of waiting involved with using Mosso. Control panel aside, I've had a lot of issues with the hosting platform. Firstly, file permissions aren't worth the pixels they are written in! Sometimes files created through apache/php have permissions that don't let me, the ftp user, near them or delete them. I can't chmod them and I can only read them. I've had to solve this several times with support tickets. Secondly, the webserver only seems to ever be able to write into folders that have 777 permissions. If this is an upload directory on a web application, I definately don't want anything in there being executable. Yeah, you could filter executables out at the web app level but I'd prefer to be as secure as possible and limit this at the filesystem level. And no shell access... this makes me want to cry. Uploading big sites (like those powered by Joomla and the like) is SO tedious over ftp (more cups of tea required). At least with shell access you can ftp a tar file into place and then extract it into the correct locations. No log file access either. Sometimes you just want access to the raw log files. I mean, it's really useful for debugging complex scripts that call lots of ajax and pear if you can tail the error.log file for a bit. It's also handy if you want to keep an eye on a production site to make sure no errors have crept in. But there's no error.log file and there's no shell access either. Uptime is also a bit of an issue for me too. I can confirm beyond all doubt that the uptime claims on Mosso's mainpage are false. Uptime has been pretty poor over the last couple of weeks. Mosso themselves admitted that there was downtime last week due to a DDOS attack. I also notice sporadic episodes of downtime. Even as I was writing this the control panel went down giving an error about 'no suitable nodes'. I *REALLY* want to give these guys a chance. The support is absolutely top notch, the concept is great but the execution is lacking. Ross
Posted by berlin, 04-24-2007, 12:58 AM
i've been monitoring sites hosted on mosso. uptime was 100% but for only a month. This week, they've been down almost every other day.
Posted by ak7861, 04-24-2007, 02:12 AM
Thank God I moved out. But for some reason they still kept my account live. Maybe a mistake? My subscription expired last week.
Posted by swoop, 04-25-2007, 04:32 PM
I have left too recently. They are just slow. But watch your credit card closely. That billing department of theirs may not be as organized as one would hope. The absolute breaking point was the last couple weeks for many users at mosso. Denial of Service attacks, hacked sites, ability to look across the file structure into other people's accounts, downed sites, continued email problems... the list goes on. Funny one person said hosts are either too limiting, or too relaxed in their security, which poses problems. I got the sense that they were too limiting in the wrong areas and too relaxed in the wrong areas. A bizzare combination. I'll let others post quotes from their forum, but you will find a good number of extremely unhappy people. But as life goes on, mosso will just get new fresh meat to sign-up. That's how it works. Wish them the best and for them to really turn things around, but if you go in now like I did, be prepare to spend your $100 a month funding their experiment and R&D.
Posted by grabmail, 04-25-2007, 06:00 PM
Try netlab. They're based on AppLogic. Would love to hear some users try them out and review them.
Posted by kjawaid, 04-25-2007, 06:59 PM
company is just five month old .... plus they are not providing windows OS .. if person have to go for linux only .. then there are several good options available in the market
Posted by Vedder12, 04-27-2007, 10:01 AM
When they start paying for loss business and lost productivity, then you will see SLA's that mean something, but most hosts give you this bs SLA 99.99999% and 5% every 6 hours of downtime. Who cares about getting $5 back when your down for 6 hours, the loss is much greater, now if they would pay $1000, then I would believe it.
Posted by swoop, 04-27-2007, 10:23 AM
You need to fight tooth and nail to get any part of the SLA back. Don't go there. It will cost you more money in time than it's worth. Mosso may someday make it. However, this is my guess. When other players come in with the same marketing and hype as they have for clusters, their offering has too many proprietary problems to be competitive. They just don't solve the basic problems of solid hosting, and the cluster just magnifies all the problems of share hosting by x number of clusters. I remember one woman on this board that seemed very rude to the Mosso sales people. But I think all of you who bashed her should probably apologize because she was smart and savvy for having ask those questions relentlessly and let it be known so many things are unacceptible. Because in the end, once you go there, you will waste money and find the exact same unacceptable truths-- but only to have wasted hundreds of dollars in hosting and also thousands of dollars of your own time. This may change in the future for Mosso. Just don't be the test animals for the experiment.
Posted by Vedder12, 04-27-2007, 10:47 AM
I know, most SLA's are a joke. But when someone actually puts some skin in it, it may mean something. I could honestly care less about getting 5% or even 100% of my monthly fee on SLA breach, I am more concerned how it effects my customers and lost business, that generally is exponentially higher.
Posted by rougy, 04-28-2007, 12:39 PM
I'm just quitting Mosso next week, too, after about a month. Great concept - I wish them well - but they have to make some changes. The control panel is too simplistic. phpMyAdmin isn't installed by default. There were form mail issues and a couple of my sites wouldn't go online at all until they made some fixes. Help center is good. Billing is there. You can be up and running very fast if you already have a basic site setup on your localhost ready for upload. They offer a user forum, but there are zero posts there. I wish them luck and hope they make it, but they need to make their control panel more...customizable. They need a "wish list" button.
Posted by Vedder12, 04-28-2007, 12:58 PM
I took a look at them, great idea but like everything else, a lot of draw backs. Lack of cron pretty much eliminates 80% of the sites I manage.
Posted by sharwood, 05-16-2007, 05:49 PM
Yes, we have been in the market a short time but we have also spent 9 month's working with 3tera and testing, researching, developing on AppLogic and from the posts I have read in this thread regarding other "grid" systems, the AppLogic platform is far more reliable. Our production grid has experienced zero downtime since it was deployed.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 05-16-2007, 11:39 PM
Search the forum - we've already beaten the applogic "grid" to death. it's not a grid, it's redundant VPSs. Even the CEO of 3tera was involved in the discussion and was called out on the carpet.
Posted by NetLabInc, 05-17-2007, 09:22 AM
If I had a dollar for every thread on this forum that bashed a new technology that threatened obsolete single server hosting technologies........
Posted by cartika-andrew, 05-17-2007, 12:13 PM
LOL - have been fighting this myself for years. I remember way back when we started in this industry the grief we took for having a clustered environment - people arguing back and forth for pages on how clusters offered zero significant benefits over a single server cpanel environment. Having said this, I do not believe Karl was bashing applogic - I think he was just calling it what it is. Again, I am a HUGE fan of applogic - and it has and will have a really nice place in the market - but, as far as being "a new technology that threatens to obsolete single server hosting technologies" - well, there have been solutions doing that for years (heck, we have been hosting on a cluster for a LONG time). I think Karls points are valid - applogic is a series of redundant, virtualized vps technologies. Not sure why you would consider this bashing - heck, I think its pretty ingenious myself -
Posted by sharwood, 05-17-2007, 12:29 PM
Fair enough, I just wonder how many people that talk about AppLogic (good or bad) have actually used the platform for any significant time period. If they had, I think the some of the negative comments and rhetoric on these boards would be quite different. It's only in v1 (with the upcoming v2 adding quite a few new capabilities) and it is a solid system. Statements like "applogic is a series of redundant, virtualized vps technologies" really leave out a lot key points (namely the scalability of the platform and the ease of which the entire infrastructure can be managed as easily as a single server and the fact that you can assemble so many different hosting service possibilities easily - single vps, dedicated, shared, clusters, you can do them all and more if you have the development time) I also think comments like those above are confusing what is running on the grid vs the underlying grid architecture itself. It's hard for me to not sound biased since we use the platform but we looked at many other approaches and this was simply the best way to go in our opinion. The ease of management, uptime and performance quality so far have done a lot to back up our initial impressions. Not to mention that a lot of technology leaders (Google, Amazon, Sun, AMD) are focusing more and more of their infrastructure efforts on virtualization. We think this has merit and the hosting industry will be one of (if not the) largest beneficiaries of these efforts.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 05-17-2007, 01:02 PM
This doesn't threaten it. I'm all for new technology and better ways of doing things. However, if you cobble some existing technology together and place a trendy, though inaccurate, moniker on it, I take issue. If I did not, then I would not be in this industry and would not have the passion and enjoyment I have for technology. edit: further, i recall the founder of applogic was on the initial thread on these very forums, and had the gaul to mention that he knew the people that are at the core of some "grid" organization. Upon further investigation, this "organization" was one of _many_ trade groups put together, like companies often do. Additionally, this "organization" had some individuals as members, not a single large company. I mention this because the guy from AppLogic somehow believed that name-dropping would somehow give credibility to his product. @CH - We have both been at this a long time. You are correct in that I was not bashing new technologies, but you were incorrect in that I was not bashing applogic. Sorry - I feel that they have not brought any innovation to the table, though it's just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt. IMO, if you want real distributed innovation look at Sun. Their grid approach(N1)is a REAL grid, not these co-located, SAN-wielding wannabes that the WHT board has seen over the past 12 months. I think it is at the least misleading/unprofessional and the most liable to market these things as grids. A grid is 100% redundant to a factor of n where n is the number of nodes. With applogic/mediatemple's GL/whatever else is out there now, out of the total number of nodes[servers], what is the minimum you need to provide every single service the grid provides? if the answer is > 1, it is not a grid. Last edited by utropicmedia-karl; 05-17-2007 at 01:16 PM.
Posted by sharwood, 05-18-2007, 10:03 AM
Interesting comments. Sounds like we're very lucky that personal attacks and opinions have zero relationship to our (or any of the other technologies you mention) platform's reliability and performance history.
Posted by tridimension, 05-31-2007, 04:28 AM
Hi, I bought managed hosting befor 3 days. But i have got a problem. They gived a ticket about this. But already no answer. My problem is: The server hasn't turkish caracter and can't use .htaccess Thi is a big problem. If the people can't use turkish caractere i can't sold this server. İ am waiting response. Regards
Posted by itisme1760, 06-03-2007, 02:09 AM
They sound good.
Posted by rougy, 06-03-2007, 10:03 AM
Mosso isn't a bad deal at all - you are up and running about thirty minutes after they get your money. It's quirky, but for some people I'm sure it would work fine.
Posted by marketanomaly, 06-07-2007, 04:53 PM
Mosso is the worst host I have ever used. Don't believe their slick marketing. The system itself is very unstable. All my websites were down for nearly an entire weekend, because their SQL server cluster went down and none of their admins knew how to fix it. When you call customer support with anything, but the most basic questions they are totally stumped. The entire system does not act like a normal Linux server, so you will have to relearn everything you thought you already knew. I switch from Mosso to HostMySite.com. They are reasonably priced and more than willing to help you with the more complicated aspects of server management. They offer a nice series of options starting with a VPS and moving up to multi-server systems depending on your needs.
Posted by leoncariz, 06-13-2007, 11:45 AM
I had terrible experience with mosso.com Downtimes with more then 5 hours, mysql errors, php errors, 500 server errors. What else should I say? Their admins are always working to fix stuff but it takes 5-6 hours. Control panel is somewhat useful but if you are new to hosting world, it is hard to figure it which tab is used for what. They don't allow SFTP, only FTP which is disaster. Phpmyadmin is not running through control panel so you should memorize acksdhacksdh kind of database passwords. What else I cancelled my account. I wouldn't suggest anyone to buy service from mosso.com
Posted by swoop, 06-13-2007, 11:58 AM
Yup. Ditto here. Yet people still ask the same questions, even with this enormous thread of horror stories. And there always appears to be a few guys who sign up for a day or two, and say everything is fabulous. You guys just wait a week or two, or even a month, then things start to deteoriate. Mosso is not worth the price. Your site will be down, guaranteed. 100% chance it will be down.
Posted by Deep13, 07-05-2007, 04:29 PM
I used mosso.com for a year, hardly any downtimes.. it was rock solid with 68K visitors in a single day... (custom CMS and vbulletin forum) Support on live help is pretty impressive.. I could not find any cons except the shell access and cron jobs. But I quite liked them.. pretty good..
Posted by ukrossco, 07-05-2007, 07:17 PM
Deep13 - they were so bad I seriously don't believe you. Post a domain to verify - I'll add it to my Pingdom checks and I bet within a month I'll be able to point out some noteworthy down time. I was with Mosso briefly and I've posted about how bad they are in this thread so I wont repeat myself. They guarantee 100% uptime... well, here's an email they sent out after some downtime as a result of a DDoS attack. But, 100% is 100%... not nearly 100% if there's a bit of a DDoS. Couldn't find any cons? Seriously? You must have enjoyed watching the control panel sit and do nothing wondering if the click you just made was a figment of your own imagination. Seriously, steer well clear of Mosso kids... spend your money on a good VPS or Dedicated and learn some sysadmin skills.... Ross ...and here's that email... -------- Mosso Support Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 10:19 PM Reply-To: support@mosso.com To: Ross Little Hello Ross Little, Starting last night and continuing with brief interruptions today, abnormally heavy and malicious traffic on our primary load balancers caused Mosso's hosted services to become slow or unresponsive. While all services have been available the majority of the day, we have experienced intermittent outages and the possibility exists that we may continue to experience small outages throughout the weekend. I want to provide some additional clarification on what exactly is occurring and the steps we are taking to resolve these issues. THE ISSUE At 9:18 pm CDT yesterday evening, Mosso technicians were alerted that The Hosting System was experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks work by flooding networks with automated, empty requests designed to prevent legitimate traffic from getting through. In last night's outage, the DDoS attack overloaded our primary load balancers, resulting in the inability to reliably serve content, as well as hampering the failing over process between devices. Though the failover took place, it left some sites/services in limbo as there were not enough kernel space resources to send out all of the ARP packets required to let the network know we failed over. LAST NIGHT'S RESOLUTION By 11:38 pm CDT, the Mosso technical team, in cooperation with the Rackspace networking team, was able to normalize the traffic patterns on our network. Through the use of Rackspace's Preventier DDoS mitigation technology, empty packet requests were denied before they hit our primary load balancers, allowing for connectivity to be restored and hosted services to function again as normal. CONTINUED EFFORTS TODAY Several times this afternoon DDoS attacks have again caused network connectivity issues affecting the availability of websites. A timeline is below (all times CDT): 11:51 AM - Sites became intermittently slow and some database connections failed. 12:17 PM - Full service restored briefly by Mosso technicians. 12:45 PM - Sites again became intermittently slow and some site and database connections failed. 13:10 PM - Customer sites were again restored to full functionality. 13:45 PM - All Mosso hosted resources, including the control panel were fully restored. I sincerely apologize for the connectivity issues caused by the DDoS attack on our system yesterday evening and today. The DDoS attacks have been of great frustration to the entire Mosso team, as I'm sure it was to you as well. In these situations, having a close business relationship with Rackspace has proven to be invaluable. Both the Mosso and Rackspace teams will continue to monitor the situation throughout today and into the weekend to respond as quickly as possible to any further interruptions of service. Once we're in a position where we can safely consider these attacks entirely mitigated, we will send more communication to let you know. Thank you for your patience and understanding. Jeremy Siefer Director of Support, Mosso: The Hosting Sytem support@mosso.com
Posted by swoop, 07-05-2007, 07:40 PM
The guy is probably from Mosso or a shill.
Posted by Deep13, 07-06-2007, 01:21 AM
hmm I don't know about others but I had a good experience with them... I have moved my account back to shared hosting as I needed them only for June.. My mosso account is gonna expire in 2 days max.. but I will PM the mosso's temporary URL to ukrossco and swoop. btw one thing, we should think twice before blaming anyone, I agree that you had a bad exp. with them.. even couple of other guys had it but does that mean, no one can have good exp. with them? In forum, everyone has right to post their exp., you have right to post bad exp. so why I can't have right to post my good exp.? Anyways, no point on arguing over it... Please check your PMs. Regards, Deep
Posted by swoop, 07-06-2007, 01:41 AM
I'm confused. You only needed them for a month, and now you are back to your old shared hosting account? But you said you were with them for an entire year in your last post. If they are so great, then why not stay with them? I give my vote of finding it very hard to believe that Mosso service was excellent, glowing, stupendous for an entire year. Unless your definition of hardly is hardly more than a few times a week. Please. Please.
Posted by Deep13, 07-06-2007, 01:44 AM
Oh my bad.. sorry for the confusion.. I was with them only for a month.. i.e. in June 2007.. and during that 1 month of period I there were hardly any downtimes and the plus point was uptime and support for me. The server was stable when I had around 68K visitors on one certain day.. (for rest, range was from 5K to 40K a day) I am sorry again for the mistake in my first reply.. I had used it for a month NOT for a year.. Regards, Deep Last edited by Deep13; 07-06-2007 at 01:56 AM.
Posted by kjawaid, 07-06-2007, 11:20 AM
Well Deep you are the first person who is satisfied from mosso services
Posted by Deep13, 07-06-2007, 01:13 PM
kjawaid - yup, you might be right, may be because I was with them only for a month.. or may be because I was lucky or may be because they have started improving but for me they were great and I will certainly go with them after few months.. (during the peak period)
Posted by froggerd, 07-11-2007, 02:19 PM
Wow, this post is still going?!? I have not posted in a while, but will update you on my mosso experience (i have multiple posts from last year). I have also dabbled with media temple. First off, I am convinced that the mosso/mediatemple model is going to be big. The idea of turn key clustered hosting is so appealing. Also, both companies are creating great models to offer new services through intuitive panels. I have been at dedicated providers and I find this model FAR superior. There is a big but. They are not quite ready. I have more experience with mosso and am still a customer. Overall a pretty happy one. Pros: intuitive panel, GREAT support, great email system/webmail (just upgraded), Microsoft and Linux support, great scalability (spikes do get spread and handled well so the digg effect does appear to be handled) Cons: still some basic features missing (although they shared a roadmap recently that is good) and stability is an issue. This last one is the big one. In april and may the platform was simply shaky - frequent, mostly small outages. There were a few months like this last fall as well. The last 6 weeks have been great. I am hoping there have been breakthroughs. But, if you really cannot have one minute of downtime, mosso is not ready...yet. Mediatemple is similar. The trade is MT support is not as good, the mail is not as good, and no Microsoft. But, MT does have more features you would find in a standard control panel environment. Hope that helps
Posted by rougy, 07-11-2007, 04:23 PM
Froggerd, Very nice to know - thank you. I never heard of Media Temple before and will take a look. I'm considering giving Mosso another try for a new biz I have in mind. Even though I wish they would do a few things differently, the help desk was superior to any I've had before or since, and they were always very responsive regarding downtime (which was little, for me).
Posted by froggerd, 07-12-2007, 09:55 AM
Couple more things for resellers since I know there are many here. Mosso is not great for retail hosters. Very good for designers and developers. There is no api, but the customer control panel is good and managing clients is easy. Also, you can tell it is a rackspace influenced company because the support is incredible. If you want to get support for your clients they offer it and it is excellent. The billing is okay, but hopefully an update they have planned will improve that too.
Posted by lookouthere, 07-12-2007, 08:48 PM
without reading 24 pages, is Mosso still a good hosting?
Posted by kjawaid, 07-13-2007, 05:17 AM
I am not in favour of Mosso . but this is a fact that this thread start more then a year ago .. they might have improve the services .. and you have to agree mosso never claims that they are looking for retails hosting reseller And what mosso lacks .. configurations which is required by retail resellers. However the downtime which they say that is impossible but still its a fact they have couple of major downtimes .. and once they had email problems
Posted by ukrossco, 08-16-2007, 04:10 AM
Hey Guys As promised, I added deep13's temporary URL for his mosso account to my pingdom sites... Here's the link - http://www.pingdom.com/reports/ugvfc...w/?name=deep13 Since I added it to pingdom, it's uptime has been 99.6% and for a company that claims 100% uptime, that's pretty poor. Even if it drops to the 99% uptime, that downtime of over 3 whole days a year... less than acceptable in my book. Plus, page load times are, on average, over a second! Poor by anyone's reckoning Ross
Posted by Deep13, 08-16-2007, 04:23 AM
aha, that URL is still working? Cool, I moved back to my shared hosting couple of days after I had sent PM to you.. About 100% uptime, actually I too do not agree that 100% is possible... but as mentioned earlier, I too had few downtimes but those were for shorter durations and the main plus point for me was, it could take the load of 70K visitors in day without any issues. So for me it was pretty good and I will go with them again.. ofcourse I will look around for other providers once their servers behaving badly for me.. I guess your link with the stats will surely help other people to decide... btw did they remove their 100% uptime claim from their site or something? (Not able to find there)
Posted by metoh, 09-25-2007, 10:31 PM
I am moving to Mosso soon. I do know they had some downtime recently but that can only be expected. Realistically, there's not such thing as 100% uptime, should call it 99.9%. Things sure go wrong. I am sure to be furious if serious downtimes happen, but to think of it that they are fixing the problem and trying to restore the servers, and they update you constantly, I feel that this is the best service for crisis management. You never know when things strike. So far the live support very good. Particularly moving because the local reseller hosting is not meeting our expectations and overpriced badly.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 09-25-2007, 11:03 PM
Strong first post.
Posted by metoh, 09-25-2007, 11:52 PM
Just my two cents worth. Took me quite a long time to search for good clustered hosting. Found Mosso the better one over Media Temple and Netfirms with the space, bandwidth and simplicity in managing files. I'm hosting an information portal, and receives about 3-5 million hits per month. Kind of nice plan from Mosso at just 100USD per month. The local firms here for clustered hosting are not as good as overseas - less space and more pricey.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 09-25-2007, 11:54 PM
I just don't get it. You mention that they've had "recent downtimes". This thread is over a year old and has always mentioned downtimes. Why would anyone choose a host with regular unscheduled downtimes??
Posted by metoh, 09-26-2007, 12:58 AM
Every host, no matter how good they are or how reputable, is bound to have a downtime. Hosts may say they have 100% uptime, but you never know what can happen to your server no matter how much you protect it with security, redundant firewalls, continuous power supplies. You can have a slight disturbance caused by anything including natural disasters, and your 100% uptime is then deemed as failed. I chose the host not particularly on how much downtimes they have. I chose it because its cost effective, 100USD for 80GB Space and 2000GB Bandwidth. I chose it because there is superior 24/7 live support. I chose it because it knows how to deal with crisis management properly - keeps customers informed constantly in a very sincerely manner. I have experiences with companies that keeps their servers up all the way through a contract, but provides bad service when it comes to fixing a small server problem - like they tell you things like "It is not our problem, we can't do anything about it" or "It's not within our job to do this for you" They fix it, you understand the problem, they keep you constantly update, you closely follow their actions - this is my idea of how a good support service should work. Everyone has their own preferences depending on the site they need to host. You might not think the same. If you believe that this host doesn't fill up to your taste, then go get a better one. For me, it does, and it is my choice. Be fair, let people have a chance to experience them, instead of turning them away first.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 09-26-2007, 01:36 AM
Most do not claim this - not sure why its being excused for a host to make a claim they have proven they cannot meet. Do you actually need that many resources? has anyone been able to actually utilize those resources for $100? unless you can convince me that you can actually use those resources for that budget for anything beyound simple static sites and that you have come anywhere near 100% uptime, then I really do not think you have examined all of the variables properly. An even better service would be one with good communication and less outages right? ie) actually meeting and heck, maybe even exceeding their advertised service levels?? Sure, try them -
Posted by metoh, 09-26-2007, 01:40 AM
Hi CartikaHosting, We will be needing those space and probably utilizing at least 3/4 of them. We will be storing our own quality photos and video coverages (seriously, loads) of music events, at least 50gb of space is needed.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 09-26-2007, 01:44 AM
Hi Metoh, For situations like this, we will often recommend one of the "larger" package hosts - if you can keep your CPU utilizations low - they may work out for you - this is really the market that these companies service and service them pretty well - however, for the average person, needing reliability and performance over everything else (and who will NEVER even come close to these sorts of resource utilizations) - do you think they are better served with these sorts of packages?
Posted by metoh, 09-26-2007, 01:46 AM
But are you able to find a host with the same specifications and cheaper than 100usd per month?
Posted by cartika-andrew, 09-26-2007, 02:04 AM
Sure - simply 100's and 100's of these sorts of offerings and for ALOT less then $100/month
Posted by metoh, 09-26-2007, 02:05 AM
Any other recommended hosts for clustered web hosting with the same specifications?
Posted by metoh, 09-26-2007, 02:11 AM
Will still go for Mosso for now. If it is good I will stay, if not should be trying your recommendations.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 09-26-2007, 02:25 AM
The obvious ones in this class offering clustered hosting with super large packages are dreamhost, servage, mediatemple, hostdepartment, etc....
Posted by HeavyEddie, 09-26-2007, 05:38 AM
I only recently switched away from Mosso and I can tell you that I had more down time with them than any of my previous hosts. It is always something different. PHP4 will be down, then php5, then mysql, then everything. I think they are on to something, but it simply hasn't matured as of yet. If I were getting 3-5 million hits a month... I wouldn't trust my sight to them. And a note on the customer service. I found the 1st level to be pretty good, but on many occasions they would pass my problem off to the next level and I would practically have to stalk them to get support.
Posted by JimmyDC, 09-28-2007, 05:48 PM
MS technologies (.NET, ...) working side-by-side with Linux technologies (PHP, ...) is really something.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 09-28-2007, 06:13 PM
ummmm - this has been done for years by many providers. Heck, anyone offering hsphere or plesk expand has had this capability for quite some time....
Posted by UltimateSoft, 09-28-2007, 06:16 PM
That's correct. That is possible with several other solutions.
Posted by aotto, 12-10-2007, 04:55 PM
The Mosso system has the ability to dynamically shift workloads in sub-second time intervals. So those customers suffering from the "DIGG" effect can be helped by the dynamic allocation of more servers, and also the other customers hosted in the same cluster can be "protected from it" by isolating those dynamically added resources to the site that's undergoing the flash crowd workload. In terms of the CP, that's a moving target. It gets a new feature release every month, so if you have not looked recently, it might be worth another visit. I'm pretty sure that there's a nice fresh one with a state of the art UI coming in a couple of months anyway if you like sexy user interfaces. In terms of the price, no it's not cheap compared to ordinary shared hosting. It's also not ordinary, which justifies the cost. I doubt Mosso will ever attempt to be the low price leader. About SLA... come on, let's be honest. Nobody's network is perfect. I don't care if you spend $1B on your network, sooner or later it will have a problem, and it will ding your uptime figures. I'd like to believe that everyone builds the best network they possibly can. A lot of problems just boil down to bad luck rather than the merits of a single individual network. The difference is what attitude your provider takes and how they treat you when they do have a problem. Those service providers who take responsibility and get it fixed are the ones who will win your long term loyalty. When you commit to putting the customer first and put out a 100% SLA, then you're properly aligned with the customers' interests. I'm grinning right now because I'm sure there will be a dozen posts following mine saying stuff like "my webhost has never gone down....". Whatever. Maybe they are not a growing company, or maybe they are extraordinarily lucky. But look, all big *growing* networks eventually have problems. That's a fact of life, and anyone who's run a large scale network knows that. Personally, I'd rather do business with a company who tells me the truth and commits to making things right if they ever do go down rather than pretending that they are the best in the world.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 12-10-2007, 05:34 PM
Anyone who says that is dillusional.... the issue I have is their system has yet to demonstrate even leading edge uptime and performance for shared hosting (forget about 100%) - and with redundant everything, you would think that would be possible. The real issue here is a lack of understanding with what causes outages in a shared hosting environment. Redundant load balanced nodes arent worth much with respect to overall uptime in a shared hosting environment (sure it can save you here or there, but, over a prolonged period of time, server failures or raid array failures aren the primary cause of service outages in shared hosting). Most outages are a result of capacity issues in combination with individual domains or users having problems eating up that excess capacity. Now, its all well and good to say that with a load balanced array, you can always add more capacity - but, the question then becomes not if you can add the capacity, but, if that capacity exists and if the provider adds it quickly enough relative to their allocation rates resulting from new account additions, etc... I know you mentioned that $100 is expensive - well, in all honesty - for 100 GB of disk space and 1000 GB of transfer - it is really inexpensive. Once you factor in unlimited domains, accounts, etc - it becomes clear why their system has not set a new bar for uptime in shared hosting... Nothing against them - they have a somewhat unique offering - they arent massively overselling like the prototypical shared hosting giants - and Mosso, I am particular, acts as a wonderful business generation machine for rackspace - all in all - I think they have done a wonderful job at positioning and marketing - and I think they provide a good product with a very strong niche and a very nice price point for some of these features...
Posted by HeavyEddie, 12-10-2007, 05:49 PM
I was actually OK with the limited functionality in the CP originally. I understood their market was different and was OK with it. I really wanted to see Mosso do a good job. A matter of fact, I stuck it out longer than I really should have. Their downtime really wasn't even close to being on par. I constantly had something breaking. I still give kudos to the first level support team... probably the best I've ever come across. But if you had to get support outside of that team, they simply sucked. If you are a member of their forums... search the forum for this username and you will see a couple of my complaints. I've been very happy with my current host, but I have to admit that I'm kind of waiting for one shoe to drop. With past hosts my servers always seem to get oversold eventually and I have to start the search again. Which is why I continue to keep one eye on Mosso.
Posted by aotto, 12-10-2007, 06:01 PM
Thank you very much for your comments. I think that if you read the Hyperic case study on Mosso, it might shed some light on what Mosso is doing differently. There really is adequate web server capacity on standby and it takes just milliseconds to bring it on-line in an automated fashion. I could be wrong, but I think that's pretty unique in the hosting industry. This is one of the advantages of operating clusters with hundreds of machines in them. There's a business intelligence system that's dedicated to making this a reality. In all fairness, not all resources can be this dynamic. For example, total storage is one, and total network capacity is another. The majority of issues related to unexpected usage can be addressed simply by having much more of those resources on hand than you actually need. It's also possible to know in advance of these things running out so they can be capacity planned in a sensible way. That's where Hyperic fits in.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 12-10-2007, 06:09 PM
Hi Aotto, I have read such literature and am familiar with what they are doing. Trust me on this - from a provider that operates a cluster with over 100 servers and from a provider that is launching something quite similar with load balanced nodes, etc - more uptime and greater reliability - always cost more money, and not less - honestly, for $100, sharing an environment with 1000 GB allocations, you would be better off in a dedicated environment.... The secret to providing higher uptime in shared environments is to have smaller arrays of load balanced servers and putting a fixed number of domains, accounts and resource allocations on each array - vs having 1 massive array with 1000's upon 1000's of domains...
Posted by aotto, 12-10-2007, 06:12 PM
HeavyEddie, Yeah, I understand that Mosso did have a few stretches in the past where reliability was sketchy. That was before I knew about them. Something must have been good, because you said yourself you're keeping an eye on them. I'll take your advice and comb the forums as you suggested. From what I can tell everything is on the up and up now.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 12-10-2007, 06:20 PM
It's their marketing/cool website. Mosso and the MT Grid have been red herrings in the hosting world over the past few years. Gimmicks come and go, yet the professionals remain. Regards,
Posted by aotto, 12-10-2007, 06:24 PM
I'm pretty sure it's not 1 massive array. My understanding is that Mosso has numerous clusters that can share server resources with each other, not one huge cluster. The key advantage over a typical dedicated server environment is that the load balancing and clustering is managed for you, and does not cost an arm and a leg to benefit from a clustered environment. Compare that to many dedicated load balancing solutions, and it seems rather compelling.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 12-10-2007, 06:36 PM
So how is Mosso different from say ESX running on 10 nodes with shared-storage(SAN)?
Posted by aotto, 12-10-2007, 06:50 PM
I would assert that if I were running a 10 hypervisor hosts on ESX for a typical LAMP application... that my monthly service prices would be substantially higher than $100/mo. I would still need to manage the SAN and make it HA. Plus, then I'd still need to implement suitable HA load balancing for the web servers, and proper replication for the database layer. Sure, if you have a huge web site and want to have unlimited control over all the dials, that you may conclude that building your own solution from a group of dedicated servers or colocated systems is ideal. The key is that not all sites can justify the cost base for all that when they are small. Using a solution like what Mosso offers is a great way to get the benefit of a fancy cluster without building it yourself, and without a high entry cost.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 12-10-2007, 07:02 PM
I think I was unclear as to my point. How is Mosso different from another web host running 10 ESX nodes with a SAN? There are many, MANY, hosts out there, ourselves included, that have been using a similar architecture for years just for day-to-day operations. It's just good engineering. We have no need to market it as a Grid, cluster, HA, "The System" or anything else that looks good on a t-shirt or cube-fodder. Regards,
Posted by aotto, 12-10-2007, 07:49 PM
You know, every web hosting company that's not using raw price as a differentiator probably thinks they have something special to offer. It's probably just like every parent thinks his own kids are cute. Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't. In observations of successful companies, I've found that they fall into one (or sometimes two) of three categories: 1) The low price leader. 2) The service leader. 3) The technology leader. Companies who try to dominate in all three areas simply don't succeed. I'd suggest that Mosso is positioned between #2 and #3. From what I can tell, it's leaning toward #2. Are there other applications of web hosting technology that are even more exciting? Probably somewhere. If Mosso does its job right it will have compelling technology for a reasonable price, and very well respected support. The right combination is what will fit the target customer the best. I happen to think that what Mosso offers is rather clever. Yes, it's more than just a pile of ESX servers and a SAN. I think the company web site speaks for itself. It makes it easy to consume clustered web hosting services for Linux and Windows. It's based on state of the art system architecture. The sincere commitment to the customer is solid. Taking all that into consideration, I think it's exciting. The bottom line is that web hosting is a complicated business which is why the business exists in the first place. That's why there's so many choices and options out there. I know this for a fact... if I were setting up a brand new web site, and had $100 to spend each month hosting it, Mosso would be my choice.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 12-11-2007, 01:17 AM
Well, so far, from the feedback posted here by ALOT of customers, you seem to be the only one with this opinion - wonderful if they are working for you - but, lets not confuse things - they arent doing much that is new or different - and loading up $100 accounts with 2TB allocations is probably one of the reasons they have had the kinds of problems they have had. Talk about capacity all you want - the simple fact is that you cant possibly provide 2TB of bandwidth, let alone CPU and RAM capacity for $100/month. The inevitable situation is overloading - and especially true when you are offering unlimited domains, etc - as eventually, those resources will try and be used. Now, Mosso is quick to try and upgrade the heavy users to rackspace types of solutions - and rightfully so - how can anyone expect to use 2TB worth of processing power for $100 - but, in the interim, those heavy users tend to cause issues on the system. I have nothing against Mosso - I do think they are leaders in what they are doing - and how it is being marketed - and all the credit to them for this - but, if you had $100 to spend on a website and associated services - and especially one you rely on - there are much better places to spend that money...
Posted by Ryan Williams, 12-11-2007, 06:02 AM
I'm not going to get involved with the general argument here, but just to clarify Mosso does have multiple Windows/IIS and MySQL clusters, and probably has multiple Linux/Apache clusters too.
Posted by dedicatedsecrets, 12-13-2007, 03:26 PM
Im kind of confused, you said that what they are offering per month is a lot they cant offer that much for $100 per month) but then you say there are better places to spend that $100 on, so please name some . Also, they have a 60 second customer service policy which i thought was cool compared to my current host anyway.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 12-13-2007, 03:53 PM
round and round we go... as I have said, I like what Mosso is doing - heck, I think we have all learned some things from them. However, unless all who have posted are wrong, their service isnt as reliable as what is already available. Some good providers to look at with better histories pair, medialayer, digitallyjustified, dynamicnet, etc... if they work for you - wonderful - have heard nothing but positives about their support - but, if proven reliability, stability and performance is what a customer requires, its not a stretch to say that other providers have a better history and track record and your money could be better spent elsewhere...
Posted by aotto, 12-13-2007, 03:57 PM
I think the above statement makes a silent assumption that the Mosso service is intended for a single billable entity. It can be, but it's really geared for resale. Mosso allows you to carve up your $100 account and resell it to (an unlimited number of) others while many web hosting user agreements simply prohibit resale. If you take that into consideration, I think the value proposition is strong. Another thing that I've noticed is different is that the Mosso Control Panel offers the ability to create "client" accounts under the main account so that resellers can allow their customers a level of self-service (create email addresses, change settings, etc) without involving the reseller. This is typically only offered by hosting companies with solutions geared for resellers. Combine that with the ability for Mosso to directly support and bill reseller's customers directly (via credit card even if the reseller does not have a merchant account) and it begins to be more compelling of a solution for resellers.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 12-13-2007, 04:03 PM
I think what you have described here is a pretty typical reseller situation that is offered by 100's of providers. The direct support is a little more unique, but certainly not limited to Mosso - I would say this model has existed for years. Hostopia is probably the leader in this field, but, many many other players as well... As for unlimited accounts, etc - well, this debate can go on and on - many providers offer such capabilities and many providers would argue that offering unlimited accounts and massive TB packages is a recipe for disaster...
Posted by aotto, 12-13-2007, 04:20 PM
Well, then let's stop the debate, and let some people with actual first hand experience with Mosso share it here rather than furthering a debate that nobody cares about. You say you have nothing against Mosso, but you keep posting FUD. Let the customer comments speak for themselves.
Posted by dedicatedsecrets, 12-13-2007, 04:23 PM
Ok, that actually makes sense, your other post was kind of contradicting and I was confused lol. Keep in mind, a lot of the posts about their uptime not being reliable was last year and its still a young company so I may give them a shot.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 12-13-2007, 04:24 PM
100%, no make that 1000% agreed (except for the FUD part, but, I dont hold that opinion against you) I certainly would encourage you and others to read the customer comments - best advise of the day.... cheers for now...
Posted by rougy, 12-13-2007, 05:22 PM
When I had them, it wasn't such a bad deal, really. I liked them but they didn't seem to be doing anything to upgrade their control panel, which is a little primative. It would be great if they would develop an API of sorts to allow some automation. Also, I think it would behoove them to make the package more liquid, 80gigs for $100, 40gigs for $50, 100gigs for $120, etc.
Posted by silentcoast, 12-14-2007, 12:23 PM
Im going to throw my two cents in here. I had a hosting account with them and had terrible down times with both email and websites. They always seemed to want to tell me there servers were not down but jump on there forumns and everyone else having same problem. Other things are they promise releases but you wait 6 months from the time they say they will release it and its still not out. They had ok support there was always someone to talk to just not always a answer. I personally didnt feel it was worth the money. But they heading in the right direction it looks like.
Posted by -=BfA=-, 05-27-2008, 02:53 PM
Well I'm just wondering if there's any updates on Mosso at all? Things have been dead quiet on this thread for the last 5 months. I searched the forums but haven't found anything recent so I thought I'd post some questions in this thread: 1) It seems they've dropped the amount of bandwidth by 1/4 and space by 1/3 since December. Has stability increased since then? 2) Has the control panel been improved at all? 3) Is there any way to find out what updates they've done in the past or are working on? It seems these only get sent out in private e-mail?? 4) What are some features they're still missing? 5) Any other items of interest on Mosso.com?
Posted by JavaV, 05-27-2008, 03:17 PM
I'm sure you can find more information on their forums. Tiffany
Posted by cristibighea, 05-27-2008, 03:21 PM
http://status.mosso.com/ This should pretty much say it all . There are issues quite often on their clusters. Is there any reason why you are specifically looking at Mosso, what needs do you have?
Posted by -=BfA=-, 05-27-2008, 03:47 PM
I'm currently developing a web application and would like to spend the necessary money to have a sound infrastructure in place before it is needed. Right now my general idea is I'll need: 3 NLB web servers 3 Clustered DB servers 2 DNS servers 2 (clustered?) Mail servers 2 (clustered?) File Servers 2 (clustered?) image servers 2 hardware firewall 2 hardware spam filter 2 switches Basically, we want to create our application on hardware that can grow with our needs and would prefer to put down cash to start off with the proper infrastructure realizing that it might even be a few years before it is all utilized. It's just easier to code for scaling than to code oing from shared hosting > vps > dedicated box > colocation. Questions I currently am researching: 1) Should I be looking at MS or OSS technologies? (Previous experience with MS coding and server admin so leaning towards ASP.Net 3.5 / SQL 2008, but am open to learning new things). 2) Should I go with our own co-located hardware or is there managed hardware that is stable and a reasonable cost. 3) How hard would it be to create a control panel that integrates the various aspects or is there an existing one we utilize that has an API available so it can be completely customized for our needs. So in short, the reason I am looking at Mosso is that it could provide a lot of what we're looking for and let us concentrate on creating our application. Perhaps Mosso is something we can look at then while we create our prototype, though we currently have a dedicated server and were looking at trying to run the above in VPS' then purchasing hardware when nearing launch. So that's why I'm looking at Mosso. If anyone has any other suggestions for hosting they would be appreicated. As I said, I'm currently exploring all options.
Posted by utropicmedia-karl, 05-27-2008, 03:52 PM
You have to be very careful of products like Mosso, as the marketing looks good, but as you've seen the real-life experiences seem to fall short of the marketing promises. As it appears you are looking for a distributed setup, the single best thing you can do is work with an individual or company that can put together a solution for you - someone who has the knowledge and experience to do this. For what you're after, you're not going to find the answers from a few forum posts. A system engineer would be able to help recommend if either a dedicated cluster or co-located hardware is best for your financial plan. Kind Regards,
Posted by -=BfA=-, 05-27-2008, 03:54 PM
FYI Here's some questions a sales person has answered for me: *************************************** Hello, I'm interested in your service and have a few questions I couldn't find anwswered on your page, Could you please let me know the answers? Thanks! 1) MS SQL Database Questions: - Will you support MS SQL 2008 when released? Yes - Is there options to set up the database caching settings? No - Are jobs allowed to be scheduled daily/monthly/etc? Yes - Are stored procedures allowed? Yes - Is full text search supported? Yes - Is there a limits on the # of tables / stored procedures or any other limitations? This question is too broad – How many tables/Stored procedures do you require? There is not a set limitation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there couldn’t be…. - Does the user have root access to each of their own databases? You are assigned dbo role. - Is it possible to create multiple databases within the 100mb or would it require a 100mb/$5 account for each database? It is possible, just make sure you speak with support via chat or phone before you set up the domain so that you’re sure it’s done how you like it – it’s simple, but not completely apparent. - What hardware do the database servers run on? That’s proprietary, but unnecessary – you have more resources (RAM, proc, etc…) than you can use. - What is the connection speed between the database servers and web servers? We do not offer this information – it varies by cluster and load; and the process, coding and scripting. 2) Windows Questions - How do you switch to running application pools in 64 bit instead of 32? You can’t. - How many application pools are you allowed? ie Can I setup an application pool for each domain? Yes - Can I install any backup software I need to do regularly scheduled backups or is there some included? We include 3 days worth of backup – anything more you need to do locally – with whatever application you like…. 3) E-mail Questions - Is there a limit on mailboxes? No - How is it setup / How does it work? Via the Control panel/simply creating the mail user. - Is there a size limit on mailboxes? 1GB, though you can get that lifted. - Is there a total size limit or does it fall under the total 50gb of space? Not counted/no limit - Can it be branded? No 4) Domain Questions - When billing clients with Canadian credit cards (Visa/MA/Amex) will this be an issue? We've had issues with this in the past that even though the credit card is valid and there is room, it is denied by the billing software either Modern bill or others. Possibly – it’s the zip codes more often than not and can usually be corrected if we know about it…. You’ll know when you sign up if it will be an issue or not…. - Are they easy to transfer? Very. - How much are they? $10 per year in addition to whatever time you have already paid for. - What TLD's are supported? Most - Do we get a % of purchase cost if our customers purchase through you? Not sure I understand the question, can you add some definition? 5) General Questions - Is there an API to programmatically add DNS information, accounts, webmail etc? No. - Is there the ability to customize the portal with my company's branding for our own customers? No, the customers portal is white label/generic - Is legal adult content allowed? Now - How does the SSL certificates work? With a dedicated SSL cert via the CP - Do you have any performance metrics or comparisons to speed / prices of running our own server? No, it varies by solution - What backups are needed / suggested? It’s always best to back up locally, but Mosso backs up the entire system every 12 hours, and you have access to that data/content for 3 days - Does the new file system support redundancy for files? Can you redefine this question? - Is there a technical list of what you allow / disallow compared to running our own server No, it would never be complete….
Posted by captainbeef, 10-02-2008, 02:23 AM
So.... Mosso hey? I was poised to sign up with them to provide hosting for the company I work for. Now, I'm not so sure. It seems that they are heading in the right direction. The question is, have they gone in that direction enough at this time? And will I experience these email and site performance issues that seem to be prevalent? It would be great to hear some up to date experiences about Mosso.


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