Initial Review of Mosso Cloud Web Hosting

This post will be an initial review covering both the positives and negatives experienced with Mosso.com cloud hosting. I have only been using them for a week, but I feel one week is long enough to offer a preliminary review, with subsequent thoughts to follow pending future incidents. Keep in mind that this is being written from an independent web publisher’s perspective, and not from a resellers perspective. Defining custom hosting packages, prices, and usage tiers is a big part of your Mosso.com account, but only applicable if you plan on reselling hosting. I can only state that from the surface it looks as elaborate as anywhere.

Mosso.com is a hosting environment based on ‘cloud’ technology. Basically its large network of servers, offering distributed hosting services. It is a high performance shared environment, focused on easy scalability. The cloud can handle growth much better than typical shared environments. I’m sure it still has its limits, where a dedicated server eventually becomes required, but it appears that resource limit is much higher than your typical shared environment. I’ll let everyone know when I reach it .

• Performance – So far the speed has been great. Maximum speeds during FTP transfers or simply accessing pages in my browser are definitely at or near 100mbps speeds. Static pages load instantly, and pages that connect to a mysql database take a few extra milliseconds. Those of you who are moving from an environment where apache and mysql are on the same server may notice a slight decrease in performance when moving to Mosso. But it is far from slow, and extremely fast all around.
• Control Panel and Organization – Adding new websites is quick and painless, specifying whether you want it in a Linux or Windows 2008/IIS7 environment. MS SQL Server is not freely included with Mosso.com, and there is a small fee if you wish to use this. When accessing your sites via FTP, you only need one account to access everything. It is even cross-platform, which is a new experience for me. I can see sites from both Windows and Linux environments in the same starting root folder. You can of course create additional FTP or client accounts for more specific permissions.
• Support – Now I don’t know if Mosso was started by or acquired by Rackspace, but what I do know is the support so far has been amazing. Rackspace is famous for their dedicated support staff, and so far this has been the same for their sister company. Every chat support experience so far has connected quickly, and each staff member has been knowledgeable. I’m sure there will be occasional hiccups down the road, but so far my experiences have been flawless.

Shared IPs

From an SEO perspective, going to a shared IP environment may raise some initial red flags. I had been paranoid for the majority of my web publishing life regarding shared IPs. Being penalized or banned from Google was a much more serious concern a few years ago. I feel that the recent changes to Google’s communication methods with webmasters has helped alleviate that paranoia. There have been numerous official responses from Google regarding shared IPs and bad neighborhoods. I am going to dig up some old research into this, and add links to official posts later on. Until then, do some digging on your own, and don’t worry about hosting in a shared IP environment. Save the dedicated IPs for sites that truly need it (SSL).

Conclusion

There are still some areas I have to monitor. For example, Mosso isn’t crystal clear on what a ‘compute cycle’ is. Each account is given 10,000 compute cycles a month. Once 2 of my higher trafficked sites have more history with Mosso, I will share traffic data and how that translates to compute cycles. My initial reaction from just a couple days of data shows I have nothing to worry about. I am still a long way from hitting the 10,000 compute cycles/month mark.