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.

Update: According to an ARIN lookup, Twitter appears to be hosted by Verio now.

Update 2: Twitter has come out on their blog to say that they are now hosted by NTT America.

According to Joyent’s corporate blog, the company stopped hosting Twitter late last night:

Twitter has been officially off Joyent since 10PM last night. This may come as a surprise to some after yesterday’s posts here and here regarding the two companies working together. Those of us at Joyent appreciate the opportunity we had to work with the talented folks at Twitter. It is a great service. We wish Twitter every continued success.

As I mentioned yesterday, Joyent is standing ready with excess free infrastructure to support Twitter through this transition in the event that they need it.

The news comes amidst frequent outage problems that have plagued Twitter. Just last night, Twitter went down again, this time for a “planned maintenance project” that went “far beyond [their] planned time window”. The service has also recently suffered downtime during the State of the Union and Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld.

Despite all of these problems, just yesterday both companies were showing strong support for each other on their respective blogs. Both wrote posts (here and here) describing how they were working together to prepare for the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.

When reached over the phone, Joyent’s CEO David Young preferred not to comment on Twitter’s stability issues in particular. He did emphasize that Joyent has free infrastructure on standby should Twitter want to use it again. He also wished Twitter the best of luck, saying the team is amazed at their “great service”.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, responded to an email inquiry about the situation as such:

We’re still very much engaged in our efforts to bring solid reliability to Twitter. Achieving our goals is a sustained effort, not an overnight fix. Performance is our most important measure of success and we appreciate both the patience and frustration folks are sharing with us.

With regard to discussing technical specifics about last night’s efforts, we’ll be more keen to do that once we have a chance to come up for air and cover it with some perspective.

Given that both companies are reluctant to go into details about the break-up, we’ll just have to see whether more information comes out in time.

Services provided by cloud computing provider Joyent have been offline for three days following issues with ZFS.

Strongspace and BingoDisk are amongst services that have been affected since January 12. Joyent CEO David Young said in a post to the Joyent forums that the service “got bit by a massive ZFS bug…that got onto/into the backups” preventing easy restoration.

Data Knowledge Center has more, and you can see our review of Joyent’s Slingshot product here.

The problems at Joyent follow ongoing difficulties at online storage provider Omnidrive, who saw its main website was down for over a week following suggestions that the service may be facing financial difficulties. At the time of writing Omnidrive’s web site is back up and other reports would suggest that the core storage service remained unaffected by the website issues; however, there are big questions about their long term viability.

The official developer release of Apollo, a platform that lets developers run their web applications outside of the browser, offline and on the desktop, is less than a week old, and they already have competition.

Firefox 3 will allow sites to work offline by accessing local datastores. And at least two
other products are offering platform products that will overlap significantly with Apollo features.

Ryan Stewart wrote about one of these, Dekoh, a couple of weeks ago and generally found it lacking.

Today, Joyent announced a new product, called Slingshot. At its core, Slingshot allows developers to build (or port) Rails applications to the desktop and run offline with “simple and transparent” data synchronization.

Existing Rails applications can be ported to the Slingshot platform, and include drag and drop of files to and from the desktop. In the future, Slingshot will include filesystem access to remote data.

There’s a great product and technical overview of Slingshot here, and a screencast here.

The Web 2.0 conference kicked off today with a number of great workshops. The highlights for us were the Attention Trust board meeting (posts below) and, of course, the Launchpad workshop where a dozen companies presented in an hour and a half.

My notes on each company are below. Many of these have been profiled here before, and we hope to get full profiles of the rest up as soon as we can schedule interviews with the teams (if you’d like to talk to me, I’m the guy with a huge TechCrunch sticker on my laptop) (Jeff Clavier also has a TechCrunch sticker on his laptop, but I’m not French, so you’ll know its not me ).

I’m breaking this down into two posts to keep it manageable. Here’s Part 1. Part 2 is here.

Social Text

Ross Mayfield spoke about wikiwyg, the first wysiwyg editor for wikis. He says its much more than a tool for wikis, however. It’s and “open source synchronous editor for the web” and his vision is that it will be used on many web applications beyond wikis. Want to try out Social Text for free? Mention web2con at socialtext and get a free five-user wiki for a year.

Rollyo

Dave Pell presented Rollyo, the roll-your-own search engine (profile).

You can create a mini-search engine from only those sites you trust or feel have relevant content, and then search against that personal search. He used a travel search example that was quite compelling – searching against just fodors, travelpost and frommers. Saved searches can be private, or public and shared with others.

Joyent

David Young talked about Joyent, a compelling network suite for small groups and companies that includes mail, calendar, contacts, files, etc., and allows developers to mash up systems on their data. Lots of tagging and “smart filters”. Open APIs to allow third party apps. Take the tour here.

bunchball

Rajat Paharia showed off his super-cool flash platform BunchBall. Rajat was also nice enough to give me a personal presentation earlier in the day. Rajat talked about how developers need both infrastructure and distribution to get applications out. BunchBall provides both – a slick flash platform (Flash 8 is required for some applications) along with open APIs, and new third party applications are automatically distributed accross the platform.

Current applications include a number of games and photo-sharing. Rajar also says that Metaliq is creating a multi user texas holdem game, to be released soon.

Check this one out. And contrary to rumors, Rajat did NOT beat me at tic-tac-toe while giving me the demo. He lies.

RealTravel

Ken Leeder talked about his new company, RealTravel. It’s centralized user content with some really sweet tagging and search/find capabilities .

The idea is to leverage user content and social networking to create a personalized experience for travel shoppers and a more effective venue for travel industry marketeres. THus, hopefully, breaking the death spiral that the online travel industry is now in: a race to the lowest price.

Zimbra

Satish Dharmara gave an absolutely stellar presentation of Zimbra (profile), although to be honest Zimbra is so damn cool and full of AJax awesomeness that he could have stood there and babbled and the audience would still have cheered.

Zimbra is an “open source enterprise-scalable collaboration server with intelligent online backup and single mailbox restore. It has hierarchical storage management”. What does this mean? You can’t run it from the Zimbra website, but you can install it on your own server. It’s Outlook as it’s supposed to be.

Read our profile. It (Zimbra, not our profile) rocks. Demo here.