Kyle Williams.com

After being with Mosso for a few months, I have decided to move to Wired Tree. All of my original opinions about Mosso in previous posts are still true, and I am not moving due to any negative reasons. It has more to do with my technical interests, and enjoying the highest performance possible when developing and managing my websites.

Reasons I am moving to Wired Tree:

• At Mosso, databases are stored on separate machines from web files/content. While performance overall is still good, having your database on the same machine as your web files makes a significant difference.
• Wired Tree is located in Chicago where I live. The connection speed between my home and the servers at Wired Tree is extremely fast, just like a local network.
• I’m immediately launching an old project that has high usage requirements (vbulletin, storage needs, etc.). I don’t have any interest in implementing caching plugins in either WordPress, or Vbulletin instances in order to minimize “compute cycles” at Mosso. I am currently well under the compute cycle requirements at Mosso, but as soon as I re-launch this old project, it will only be a matter of months until I get close to that 10,000 cycle limit.

I’ll offer a more detailed review of my experiences with Wired Tree in a month or two.

[Addition] Please read comments for most recent updates to this topic. [/Addition]

I host a friend’s personal WordPress site on Mosso, and it receives enough traffic to run some estimations. Overall the numbers look pretty safe. These numbers are only estimates based on the limited data I have. I will definitely publish additional data as I receive it.

First, let me point out that if your site is made up of static pages with no database connections, you shouldn’t have any compute cycle usage concerns. Roughly 20,000 unique visitors to www.surviveoutdoors.com = 100 compute cycles. It would take tons of traffic to go over your limit.

The personal WordPress site is averaging 100 compute cycles per 1733 unique visitors. So if your WordPress site receives 1733 unique visitors a day, over a month you will use up 3000 of the 10,000 compute cycle limit. A WordPress site that receives 5718 unique visitors a day will be right around the 10,000 compute cycle limit for the month. So how can I recommend Mosso, when we all know you could move a 5718 visitor/day WordPress site to a typical $10/month hosting account?

Why I still highly recommend Mosso

Mosso is still a great entry-level to mid-level hosting option. The support and communication has been wonderful. Being able to host both Windows and Linux sites through the same account is great. Mosso is the ideal option for someone who doesn’t feel comfortable having a managed VPS or dedicated server. Mosso is perfect for someone who wants an easy interface, to test out dozens to hundreds of small projects, moving the projects that take off to a different environment. While 5700 unique visitors a day to a WordPress site may seem like a low limit, it is plenty of room for general project startups and numerous small businesses.

However, when a low-bandwidth 5700 unique visitor/day WordPress site could simply pay $10/month somewhere for hosting, this does show that something is weird when it comes to the compute cycle method. Either that, or shared hosting companies take a loss on low bandwidth, high CPU usage sites.

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.

I decided to give my inactive blog a fresh start, after moving to Mosso.com hosting. I had been paying for both a dedicated Linux server, and individual shared Windows hosting accounts, and decided it was time to downsize the monthly cost. I honestly wasn’t even coming close to using half of the dedicated server’s resources. Hopefully this first post won’t jinx my great experience with Mosso so far.

When deciding to switch to Mosso.com, the biggest hurdle for me personally was dealing with the shared IP environment. I had been paranoid for years about keeping each site on a dedicated IP, not in any way connected with other random unaffiliated websites. However, after re-researching the topic, and reading numerous official responses from Google on the subject, I decided to drop my paranoia. The Mosso.com benefits are well worth the loss of dedicated IPs.

My next post will be a complete summary of my initial experiences with Mosso.