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

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?

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

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.)

If they don't allow much mysql usage, then I will not transfer there my forum.

Thank you for your informations guys.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

Very wise, Ryan.
I will ask mosso.com support if they can give me some URLs of the biggest forum hosted with them.

Very wise, Ryan.
I will ask mosso.com support if they can give me some URLs of the biggest forum hosted with them.

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.

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?

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!

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.

They didn't told me the URLs of their biggest forum.

And I doubt they ever will.. since it would probably break their privacy policy. Do you advertise the names of *your* clients?

I would ask my client if it is ok for him :)

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/problems-with-mosso-web-hosting-fixed-we-now-have-a-perfect-web-host/

no cron job? out of the question.

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. "


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?

No Cron job is a major bummer. It almost made me (and still making me) rethink being with Mosso.

No Cron job is a major bummer. It almost made me (and still making me) rethink being with Mosso.

Have you gotten any feedback as to when it is on the roadmap?

I am sure it is only a matter of time. Their growth path seems to be steady.

So... what's the bottom line on Mosso? Thumbs up? Or thumbs down?

So... what's the bottom line on Mosso? Thumbs up? Or thumbs down?

That will depend on the needs of person to person. A thumb up for me, might not be a thumb up for you.

This thread...will never die

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.

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.

another review on mosso. not just me who is happy. this guy sums it up pretty well:

http://jhuskisson.com/

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

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).

They are actually down at the moment on the Windows side. Linux is up and down for weeks.

Ouch. Not good for their ability to boast uptime, which I think has largely been stellar in the past.

Any systems that doesn't allow cron jobs is NOT production ready. NEXT!

Did not expect this from Mosso. I guess, they are still having problems with their clusters.

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).

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).

Did not expect this from Mosso. I guess, they are still having problems with their clusters.

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 costs. 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.

Any systems that doesn't allow cron jobs is NOT production ready. NEXT!

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?

There is gridlayer? VPS?

elasticlive.com runs in AMAZON.com facility. 1,000 times more powerful than mosso which probably runs in only 15 or so servers.

elasticlive.com runs in AMAZON.com facility. 1,000 times more powerful than mosso which probably runs in only 15 or so servers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What about databases and support for programming languages? :)

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.

Yes. They are incredibly responsive to any customer issue.

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.
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

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.

Mosso has great potential. I moved from dedicated to cluster. No issues so far.

Mosso has great potential. I moved from dedicated to cluster. No issues so far.

how long ago?

please keep us updated.

how long ago?

please keep us updated.
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. :agree:

Big disaster at Mosso for two weeks now. Jury is still out.

Big disaster at Mosso for two weeks now. Jury is still out.

Would you mind to be a little bit more descriptive? :)

Would you mind to be a little bit more descriptive? :)

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.

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. :agree:

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.

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.
Maybe I was but I strongly believe they will improve for the better gradually. That's all what counts to me.

Maybe I was but I strongly believe they will improve for the better gradually. That's all what counts to me.

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.

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.

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.

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 certain 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.

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.

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.

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.

Mosso would be pretty good for generic sites, however for serious web developers they lack the flexibility and customization of an actual server.

I'm still testing my sites on Mosso. Will post an update soon. On an average, I take about 1500 gigs bandwidth a month.

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.

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.

MT's setup is similiar to Mosso's and they have similar problems. I'd say avoid the grid setups until they stabalize.

anyone tried servage.net?

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.

MT's setup is similiar to Mosso's and they have similar problems. I'd say avoid the grid setups until they stabalize.

MT's setup isn't a grid.

MT's setup isn't a grid.


Why do they call it a gridserver then?

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

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.

Thank God I moved out. But for some reason they still kept my account live. Maybe a mistake? My subscription expired last week. :eek:

Thank God I moved out. But for some reason they still kept my account live. Maybe a mistake? My subscription expired last week. :eek:

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.

Try netlab. They're based on AppLogic. Would love to hear some users try them out and review them.

Try netlab. They're based on AppLogic. Would love to hear some users try them out and review them.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I had a dollar for every thread on this forum that bashed a new technology that threatened obsolete single server hosting technologies........

If I had a dollar for every thread on this forum that bashed a new technology that threatened obsolete single server hosting technologies........

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 -

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.

If I had a dollar for every thread on this forum that bashed a new technology that threatened obsolete single server hosting technologies........

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.

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.

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

They sound good.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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..

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 <support@mosso.com> Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 10:19 PM
Reply-To: support@mosso.com
To: Ross Little <rosslittle@gmail.com>
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

The guy is probably from Mosso or a shill.

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 <support@mosso.com> Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 10:19 PM
Reply-To: support@mosso.com
To: Ross Little <rosslittle@gmail.com>
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

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

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.

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

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 particular 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

Well Deep you are the first person who is satisfied from mosso services

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)

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

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).

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.

without reading 24 pages, is Mosso still a good hosting?

without reading 24 pages, is Mosso still a good hosting?

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

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/ugvfc4fhonlr/check_overview/?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

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)

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.

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.

Strong first post.

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.

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??

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.

Hosts may say they have 100% uptime

Most do not claim this - not sure why its being excused for a host to make a claim they have proven they cannot meet.

I chose it because its cost effective, 100USD for 80GB Space and 2000GB Bandwidth.

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.

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.

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??

Be fair, let people have a chance to experience them, instead of turning them away first.

Sure, try them -

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.



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.

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.

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?

But are you able to find a host with the same specifications and cheaper than 100usd per month?

But are you able to find a host with the same specifications and cheaper than 100usd per month?

Sure - simply 100's and 100's of these sorts of offerings and for ALOT less then $100/month

Any other recommended hosts for clustered web hosting with the same specifications?

Will still go for Mosso for now.

If it is good I will stay, if not should be trying your recommendations.

Any other recommended hosts for clustered web hosting with the same specifications?

The obvious ones in this class offering clustered hosting with super large packages are dreamhost, servage, mediatemple, hostdepartment, etc....

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.

MS technologies (.NET, ...) working side-by-side with Linux technologies (PHP, ...) is really something.

MS technologies (.NET, ...) working side-by-side with Linux technologies (PHP, ...) is really something.

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....

That's correct. That is possible with several other solutions.

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.

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....".

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 certain, 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...

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.
I was actually OK with the limited functionality in the CP originally. I understood their market was different and was OK with it.

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.
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.

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...

Thank you very much for your comments.

I think that if you read the Hyperic case study (http://download.hyperic.com/pdf/Hyperic-CS-Mosso.pdf) 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.

Thank you very much for your comments.

I think that if you read the Hyperic case study (http://download.hyperic.com/pdf/Hyperic-CS-Mosso.pdf) 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.

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...

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.

:)

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.

:)

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,

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...

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.

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.

So how is Mosso different from say ESX running on 10 nodes with shared-storage(SAN)?

So how is Mosso different from say ESX running on 10 nodes with shared-storage(SAN)?

I would assert that if I were running a 10 hypervisor hosts on ESX for a typical LAMP application... that my monthly service costs 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.

I would assert that if I were running a 10 hypervisor hosts on ESX for a typical LAMP application... that my monthly service costs 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.

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,

I think I was unclear as to my point.

How is Mosso different from another web host running 10 ESX nodes with a SAN?


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.

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.

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