Mosso, a provider of clustered hosting services, recently re-launched themselves. They are now calling their system “The Cloud“, which refers to cloud hosting. It seems they are jumping off the “Grid Hosting” bandwagon and using a slightly more realistic term.

Let me say I absolutely love the idea of Mosso and believe they are a true innovator of the industry. They have a platform here that allows you to do windows/linux all in one that is clustered/load balanced and easily scalable for the end user, this is absolutely amazing. Mosso also designed “The Cloud” to be reseller friendly. This takes all the administration work out of running a website or a web hosting business, you just point and click to add clients or websites.

I am not saying their platform is perfect, there have been many bumps and bruises along the way but there always are when you are the innovator. Some features still need to be added like ssh access, more reliable stats, backups that can be downloaded, etc. Overall it seems like they are pushing forward with their system and listening to their user community on features.

With the recent re-launch Mosso pared down their plans from 80 GB Space, 2000 GB Transfer to 50 GB Space, 500 GB Transfer. I think this is a bit more realistic and needed to be done to actually make a profit on customers. I would actually say they probably need to lower to the space to 20 GB and offer packages to upgrade easily.

Now comes the big mistake in my mind, they also put in a request limit to their plans which was 3 million requests (a request is each file pulled from a webpage, in a single page you can have 20-200 requests on average). I can’t stress how just absolutely amazed I was that a company on the right track could take such a huge u-turn. The problem here is that requests are not a true measure of server resource usage.

I can have a website that does extensive database queries that uses up massive resources but only uses 10 requests. Then I can have a static website that uses practically no resources generate 200 requests per page. You are unfairly punishing people just because they may have a lot of images/css/etc. files on their website. Yes, you can re-code your site (you shouldn’t have to) but if you are using Mosso as a reseller platform you can’t tell your client they need to re-code their website to your standards. These points were all fought out on the Mosso forums by myself and many other customers.

Instead of going by hits I suggested that Mosso go by actual resource usage like MediaTemple goes with their GPUs. This is an actual server resource usage metric which is fair to everyone. This was rebuffed by Jonathan at Mosso as too difficult for clients to understand. I don’t really buy this explanation as MediaTemple has tens of thousands of customers that are just fine with this measurement and understand it just fine. My guess is Mosso’s management saw this as a difficult task and is just trying to go the easy route without the understanding of what this actually does. RackSpace could have also played a part in this decision so that clients would see it as cost effective to get a server rather than keep paying to upgrade the amount of requests you get.

In the end Mosso is still not changing their stance on measuring requests; instead they have raised the plan allowance to 10 million with additional requests at costing $.03/thousand. This is a sad time for Mosso as I truly believed they were going to change the industry; however with this idiotic metric they will begin to slowly bleed their client base.

Tags: clustered hosting, mosso, Rackspace

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.