Last week’s incident with Amazon Web Services briefly going down may have raised questions about the reliability of cloud computing, but demand is high enough for competitors to keep trying to get into the game. The more companies that enter this space, the cheaper and more competitive that Web-scale computing should become.
Today, hosting provider Rackspace is offering a new cloud computing service through its subsidiary Mosso. (Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). The service competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), although it doesn’t require any load balancing or other administration. It also competes with Joyent and Media Temple’s Grid Service. Pricing starts at $100 a month for:
—50 GB of storage
—500 GB of bandwidth for transferring data
—3 million HTTP requests.
From there additional capacity per month costs:
—$0.50/GB of storage
—$0.25/GB of bandwidth
—$0.03/1,000 HTTP requests
This is a bit more expensive than Amazon (which charges in a different way) but a lot cheaper than the $350 to $400 a month Rackspace charges to host a dedicated server for a Website.
Mosso bills itself as a Web app hosting service. Applications are hosted on redundant server clusters (although the data center is only in one location, so something could take the whole thing out—like, say, if a truck were to run into a nearby power transformer). Coders choose what technology stack they want their apps to run on and upload their code. Mosso supports both Windows and Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Perl, Python, MySQL, and SQL Server. (Amazon, in contrast, does not support Windows). Mosso does not yet support Java applications, but it is working on that. The company actually has been testing the service for nearly two years and already runs 37,000 apps.
I tried to give them my money and was told that Facebook apps violate the TOS. Sad…
I’m still a bit hesitant when a hosting company says they fully support all platforms and languages. Each one has nuances and I don’t know but I often still feel more comfortable with one that specializes (maybe I’ve been writing in .NET too long) like orcsweb, who specializes in windows and knows everything about all the versions (from the framework to sql server) and how to work around and can actually provide real help if there are ever issues.
Mitch, what is TOS???
Just talked to the online rep and he told me that SSH access is not yet available.
#3: Terms of Service
Not sure that I would trust Rackspace after all the things I have been hearing lately. Additionally I have not heard great things about Mosso either, and that has been since the very start. The pricing is reasonable, but we’ll see how the uptime and support is. There are always a lot of kinks to work on in a service like this. Media Temple, which strikes me as a much more capable company, has had loads of fixes in order to get their Grid into a reasonably OK state.
I’ve been a rackspace customer for about 4 years (dedicated hosting, not cloud computing) and they are by far the best to work with (out of the 5 different hosts ive used over the years).
When you call in, you speak directly to a human who puts you in touch with your support team within 3 minutes. Their support has been amazing, can help with database issues, connectivity, security, load balancing etc.
I’d rather dabble in cloud computing with rackspace than amazon
This seems like a good deal until you realize 3 million requests/month is not very much if you include serving ajax requests, rss feeds, widgets and images through them, that will translate to around 10,000 real page views a day, which is pretty small. I can see the advantages if you host of lot of client sites or have a site which has a high revenue to pageview ratio.
Eric you need to do more research :p you missed flexiscale http://www.flexiscale.com/
its even in crunchbase
http://www.crun...p;commit=Search
They do windows hosting.
No Mosso Vosso, Enjoy the MAZIC on http://moviemazic.com
A couple thoughts:
1) $100/mo? Hey, I have an idea — let’s have PG&E bill us all $500/mo, and if we use less energy, well, then, hey, our loss. There’s a reason Amazon is compared to a utility — they charge using the same model. For all its technical innovation, Mosso is stuck in the hold hosting company mindset for part of its model/pricing.
2) They don’t provide the ability to load OS images (like EC2) does, so they fall somewhere along the lines of 3tera in terms of how much vendor lock-in you suffer by choosing Mosso as your one-in-a-world specific solution.
(I spent some time with one of their reps today confirming this.)
3) If you spent a couple days with ant build scripts ({sigh} — I know I just have…), then EC2 instances are identical to the ones you have access to in a regular colo (We have both.) So, your vendor lockin with EC2 is minimal if any. (S3, of course, is a separate story, but it depends on how you use it and what abstractions you layer on top.)
4) Is it just me, or do you think of the cheap-o Target brand of “Mossimo” clothes when you hear “Mosso”?
Ok, maybe (4) is just me since I’m bootstrapping (EC2 pun intended) our little-co at the moment…
Your neighborhood friendly,
failure-server
Cloud Computing
Mosso is not new and more importantly it’s not cloud computing. It’s fundamentally just “shared” server hosting, but built using enterprise-grade infrastructure that (in theory) can provide better reliability and much more flexibility.
All your site content is hosted on a SAN or NAS. Load balancers route specific kinds of requests (ASP, PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails) separately to pools of app servers that best handle each language/framework. That means your PHP code will execute on a Linux box and your ASP code will execute on a Windows box. This is a great concept, but it certainly adds complexity.
I take issue with Mosso being called “Cloud Computing”. Advanced as the platform is, they are not doing anything fundamentally different than the shared server offerings of companies like DreamHost or 1&1. These companies services are designed for hosting web sites, not “computing” in the Google, HPC or grid sense.
Amazon EC2 is great for running your farm of web spiders or some massive distributed processing app. What people don’t understand is that EC2 should not be used for hosting generic web sites. It’s a compute service, not a web host.
Ok first and foremost I’m biased as anyone could be so no-one can accuse me of hiding that fact.
IMHO I agree with #12, albeit they’ve added some clever new tricks, it’s nothing majorly new compared to what some companies have been doing for years.
I’d like to believe that we (FlexiScale) have hit the middle ground nicely, with a platform that’s very viable for webhosting, as well as computing clusters. We will also be added a management stack allowing for ultra scalable LAMP hosting (but with your own dedicated resources and configurations, as we scale individual customers at the hardware level rather than at the application) in the coming months.
Just my 2p
Bullshit pricing. LOL. Good luck.
Correct me if I am looking at it from a inncorrect perspective. The online rep claims that if I switch a web app to them then I don’t have to worry about scalability anymore. So basically no need to recode PHP-mySQL app but just upload it to Mosso and they will make sure its as fast as possible regardless of the load? If that’s true that’s a pretty good service.
I have been a Mosso customer for 2 years. This is complete BS. Their plan for the last 2 years has been $100/month for 1 terabyte of transfer and 80gb of storage. My plan and pricing has not changed, and they arent offering any new technology that we dont already have access to. So apparently new
customers are taking it right up the rear.
This disappoints me because they are a good company and their support is great. I guess someone let the marketing dept out of their cage.
Erick,
Their price is $0.03/1000 requests.
Today? Today they’re offering cloud computing? If a press release doesn’t get you the info you need, try the Web Archive of their site to see how OLD this story is.
Between this and Fotonauts, this is some hot coverage.
There are obviously other players in the space other than Mosso, RackSpace, Joyent and Media Temple. ServePath has been offering a Grid Series product since July of 2007. This product is essentially dedicated hosting but with more scalability, redundancy and security than traditional dedicated hosting.
But there are other ways to do Grid-type hosting. Amazon has capitalized on this and offered a different style of billing model and, I guess, level of service. When one thinks of utility computing (a term that has been bounced around in this space for some time), one doesn’t necessarily think of grid computing. However, if you take the “utility” term to heart and follow that billing model, new possibilities arise. This is part (emphasis on “part”) of the reason why ServePath is launching a new Grid product called GoGrid. Part of the differentiation in this space is the fact that service is billed by usage. I echo the comments made by #10 above about the pain of paying for a service and then only using a fraction of it. In my opinion, there is a need (especially as companies or start-ups look toward maintaining a smaller hosting expense) to only pay for what you use. GoGrid is priced as such, in fact, it is has hybrid pricing to allow you to simply “pay as you go” for RAM usage and outbound transfer, as well as “pre-buy” packages of these allotments. The other parts of the offering are easily comparable (dare I say leap-frogging) to that of Mosso or EC2: on-demand web-based deployment, server image libraries, full root-access (SSH/RDC), Linux AND Windows hosting, all packaged within a slick AJAX GUI.
#12 (Metabass) takes issue with Cloud Computing. I too found the terms to be confusing which was part of the reason I tried to clarify some of the terms (at least from my perspective). Would love feedback on that.
#1 (Mitch) – I quickly reviewed the TOS but didn’t see anything specific to Facebook (but it was a quick scan). What I could think is that perhaps they are worried about high traffic volumes on FaceBook Apps. I would love to hear specifically where this is called out.
#7 (Been there) – Agreed. You should ALWAYS check to see how support is available and the types of Professional Services that a company offers to help you with your needs.
I didn’t want this post to be a soap-box pitch. My reason for replying to this thread is simply to make users (current or potential) of any Grid offering understand that there are OTHER providers out there. Just be sure that you shop them well, look at what they offer, look at their SLA, understand their pricing and find the best fit for you needs.
@Tony,
Aren’t you guys just another VPS provider? Doesn’t really seem like you guys are doing anything special.
Ross,
Couldn’t be more different, VPS providers split individual machines into cut down servers effectively. We use the power of virtualisation to allocate resources where they are needed across a cluster as a whole (and let customers pay by the hour to boot).
Our internal is very similar to Amazon’s in structure, I’d be happy to take you through it if you are interested.
More info on http://www.tech...inst-amazon-s3/ as well.
99.99999% uptime?
@Tony,
So are you saying you can allocate two different physical machines resources to one “vps/instance”?
I’d love to hear more from you on this, please email me at ross [at] dillio.net
Doesn’t Rack Space sponsor this site?
Ross,
I wish I could but not quite that clever, I’ll drop you an e-mail.
Popularo is picking Mosso.
We wrote the other day on our blog how we were building some of popularo using Amazon’s Web Services, and how we were concerned about it after the outage the other day.
Well, after some internal discussion and research, it looks like we are going to use Mosso’s Cloud Computing Service when we launch.
I like the fact that MySQL is clustered at Mosso, unlike MediaTemple (who we also like), and it’s REAL MySQL, not the wacky SimpleDB “not a database” thing that Amazon offers. As TC pointed out, pricing is higher than AWS , but this really does seem like a case of you get what you pay for.
I would check out http://status.mosso.com/
Very unreliable. I switched when they had me offline for 2 days )I had not even been using their service for a week). They’re growing pains are incredible, and their backend security is very minimal (file paths are predictable). Their service offering is very enticing, and as a suite the product looks promising, but they simply go down wayyyyyyyyy tooooo muchhhhh.
Customer service is very, very good. Get a human every time. But they simply go down wayyyyyyyyy tooooo muchhhhh.
3M HTTP requests per month? That’s tiny. I’m surprised they’d even want to do any sort of billing using that metric. Hell, my site did 259M yesterday alone, and we still aren’t worth of a TC mention… it’s all good though…
what’d that work out too if i used them, $240k/mo? lol!
you can see the stats at http://fubar.com/geek.php if you’re bored.
-mike
AVOID.
I strongly second the suggestion to check http://status.mosso.com to know what you’d be getting into. Mosso is a great idea, with great promises and very gracious customer service, but horrible execution when it comes to the one thing you pay them to do — keep your sites up. I earned myself 6 months of pain by electing to host some of my company’s sites here.
Mosso has been around for 2 years, as I mention in the post. What’s new here is the pricing has changed and they are now targeting developers instead of resellers. So for many Web app developers it is essentially a new offering.
I have been a Mosso customer for a while now and today’s release of their new pricing scheme is HIGHLY DISAPPOINTING (especially when considering that there has never been any mention of this in the past). 3M HTTP requests is not that much at all when you consider that their hosting package is designed for those of us that host multiple client sites. Get more than a few sites on there that see a fair amount of traffic, and you’re done for. There is a bunch of heated comments in the Mosso forums right now about this; hopefully we will see them remove their charging by requests scheme. I am still in shock!
I’ve been a Mosso and MediaTemple Grid-Server client for a while. Mosso is far -and-away a better service. More reliable, better uptime, faster load times. You get what you pay for…
You guys are sponsored by CrackSpace and you host with MediaTemple. No wonder you are pumping CrackSpace’s Mosso Shared Hosting.
So how exactly is this different from a hosting service like godaddy? Can someone clearly explain the difference between hosting services and cloud computing? I host my website on godaddy and I still haven’t found any reason to switch to so called “Cloud computing” providers. Am I not the real target of these solutions? Given the volume that I do and given the amount of storage I need, the solution being offered here is definitely not price-competitive for me.
John – I’m not being an ass about it. Seriously. But if you have to ask this question, you don’t need cloud computing. The scalability is key here. Need comes from enormous requests. If you’ve never had any issues, then stay where you are!
The best offering they have is the white label control panel, billing and support services. That is pretty awesome for re-sellers.
Besides that, the rates for this ‘cloud’ computing offering are pretty insane.
This is very interesting, because Mosso seem to be everywhere at the moment.
John: At Go Daddy your account sits on a single web server with a bunch of other accounts, which between them can only use the space and computing power available on that machine. That’s shared hosting. Then there’s dedicated hosting – you have your very own dedicated machine, but are still limited by the space and computing capacity of that one machine.
Mosso uses virtualization to allow hosting clients to access resources from a cluster of servers. You now have access to a larger pool of resources than before. But you pay for that scalability (hence the $100 monthly fee and surcharges). If you’re paying $5 to $10 a month at Go Daddy, Mosso is in another weight class as far as budget goes.
Here’s our take on Mosso’s retooling, along with some relevant history:
http://www.data...ting_cloud.html
Nice try but I agree with #12. Mosso isn’t new! This is an advertorial.
Well, this is the first I have heard of a North American datacenter provided in the us that hosts IIS7 and asp.net wrapped in cloud computing. I believe excalibur does as well, but I think they are hosted in the UK?
The HTTP request thing is terrible. Even nirvanix doesn’t charge for http requests.
This strikes me as old news, I evaluated Mosso last year. I’ve also used EC2 and agree with the person who said it’s a compute service, not a web hosting service. We’ve since moved our application to Slicehost, which seems to be a middle ground between dedicated and virtualization. I can upgrade/downgrade nodes as needed with minimal impact and I don’t have to worry about data loss if a node goes down (EC2). It’s actually cheaper in the long run. I’m not sure why they are never mentioned in posts like this, PR I guess.
comments like 13, 17, 19, 41 are spot on. This is another below-average TC article, and Erick’s response is odd, “What’s new here is the pricing has changed and they are now targeting developers instead of resellers.” OK, why isn’t that the title or the lead? “Rackspace has new marketing plan for 2 year-old service.” What’s also strange is the mention of the Amazon outage but not a reminder about all of the Rackspace problems from a few weeks ago.
#39 calls it: This is an advertorial.
Mosso SUCKS. Used them for all of 2 weeks and the service, servers, and customer service were all horrendous. Stay away!
To follow up on #42 and Erick’s response – yes, there’s a change in pricing, but it’s a change for the worse!
And as a developer, let’s just say that the Python support is pretty laughable. You can run python in cron jobs, that’s it.
I have been Ev1servers.net user and now “The Planet” .. this company is the leader in my opinion when it comes to dedicated servers. Do a trace on my domains/IPs to prove.
In any case, I have dabbled with cloud computing since it was introduced by Amazon. Cloud computing is great for web apps and video/bandwidth heavy sites.
As more and more sites use more bandwidth heavy content, cloud computing will grow in popularity.
20. @Michael,
You don’t have a grid!!!! Please quit with all the false marketing as it is just getting silly. I expected better out of ServePath rather than them letting their marketing people make down right false statements. At least EC2/flexiscale/etc. aren’t using the marketing mumbo jumbo and actually let their customers know what their products really are.
@ Ross,
Thanks for trying to keep me honest. However, I have asked you a couple of times for your definition…in fact, part of the reason I wrote “Understanding Grid Computing” on the GoGrid blog was because of your responses.
So, once again, I ask that you please define your understanding and interpretation of a Grid and how you feel I may be mis-representing our offerings. I am open to commentary and gladly encourage refinement from others within the field.
Do any of the other players in the space fall into your definition of a Grid? If so, how?
Please set me straight, if that is your desire.
Thanks! I am all ears…
Mosso:
50 GB of high-performance SAN storage space?
500 GB of monthly bandwidth?
3 million requests per month?
Other dedicated hosting:
add more space you want to?
10MB line or 100MB line?
load balance or double up the CPU?
you want to use which 1?
1st you cannot conf the server (apache, linux, mysql) because u don’t own the server!
2nd you don’t have full access to the hardware because the hardware is shared!
If you want to host a good website, there is no way you will choose mosso hosting.
The success of this will depend on how good is their marketing and sales. It’s not a bad service per se, but it seems to be geared towards newbie developers and hype startups.
If they can replicate Rackspace’s marketing/sales success, they should be set. I don’t think though any serious developer would choose this. It’s not clear if the service is scalable, there is no root access, and there seems to be many downtimes. And charging for HTTP requests is ridiculous.
I also anticipate that many hosting companies will jump into this space, so along with usual VPS, shared and dedicated offerings you’d get cloud hosting. So this should make things tougher for Mosso in the future.