Mosso, too good to be true?

[jls33fsls]

I have been running my sites on dedicated servers from The Planet for 4 years now. I go through about 500,000 page views per day with a fairly intensive web app (1000+ queries/s). Mosso keeps coming up and it is really interesting me. The promised peace of mind would be a relief and I often have trouble with site lag during peak times even with fairly high end servers. I am wondering if Mosso could work for me or if it is just too good to be true.

I searched the forums, but most of what I found was from 2006 when it first came out, wondering if I can get any info from people who have had experience or heard things more recently.

[gate2vn]

From their site, cloud hosting starts at $100/month, that you will have 10K commute cycles. That's equivalent with 2.1M pages views on a database-driven site.

Your current site has 500K page views per day ~ 15.5M pages views per month that you will need around 8 x 10K commute cycles at Mosso. The price would be around $800/month, just for 80K commute cycles, not sure about your current bandwidth usage.

With that amount of money, I would think about 2 cluster servers: one for web and one for database, connected together by gigabit LAN.

Just for reference, our dedicated mySQL servers have quad-core CPU with 8GB RAM, raid-10 disks array, and they serve 800+ connections on each with server load around 1. So, it can process more.

[jls33fsls]

Well cost isn't too big of a deal since it is a small fraction of the income the site generates. I just want to maximize performance.

[gate2vn]

I guess you will need to contact Mosso then, with your own requirements, ask for their infrastructure, how you can validate it, etc.

Also, with that kind of site, you don't want to move again in short time, so planing your growing, and asking if they can afford it. How they will add more commute cycles into your account when needed, will it lead to any downtime, etc.

I know Rackspace is a premium vendor, but I read some bad comments about them recently. I have no direct experience with them, so sorry, I cannot compare their performance with the thing I posted above. I just can say that clustering system can bring much more performance than single server, if you are on a standalone system.

[jls33fsls]

Okay thanks, I might look into doing that as well since I am currently just on one box and it gets quite sluggish at times, especially when a lot of sql queries are going through.

[gate2vn]

You will be surprised when moving to clustering system. I see many server vendors offering high-end CPU such as dual Happertown model, but with single disk, no RAID. The disk is bottle-neck in server. Why do they offer that? Wasting CPU power and asking customer to upgrade?

Try yourself with 2 servers with raid-10 disks array. You can even use smaller CPU, but will have better performance

[SoftsysHosting]

You will be surprised when moving to clustering system. I see many server vendors offering high-end CPU such as dual Happertown model, but with single disk, no RAID. The disk is bottle-neck in server. Why do they offer that? Wasting CPU power and asking customer to upgrade?

Try yourself with 2 servers with raid-10 disks array. You can even use smaller CPU, but will have better performance

Well, I will 100% agree with you. Disk I/O is always a bottle-neck in the server. We are using Fast disks in RAID - 10 array and it is giving wonderful performance - on all of our dedicated web, database and email servers.

- Rick

[bhanson]

The advantage of Mosso comes with not having to do any server configuration, maintenance, or deal with scaling architecture. You simply pay more as your website grows and they handle everything for you.

They had a rough start, but the technology is still pretty new so that was expected. I'm pretty sure they have most of the issues ironed out by now.

You'll get a better performance upgrade moving to a CDN if you're not already using one.

[~ServerPoint~]

I see Mosso have established name on the WHT and it is trusted one. If you feel they are better for you then your current host why don't give them a try?

[Karl]

Hi,

Sounds like you could be ideally suited to getting a managed service from a reputable provider that will help you optimise the server configuration and help identify any bottle-necks inside your application. More often than not, we find that customers experiencing slow downs at peak times can elliminate them with some optimisation of their code and database structure + queries - Eliminating the need for a hardware upgrade. Obviously there comes a point when a hardware upgrade will be required - but upgrading before you've eliminated application issues is a major waste of money (and time), as you'll not get the benefit of your new hardware.

Thanks,

[Kaumil]

With that amount of money, I would think about 2 cluster servers: one for web and one for database, connected together by gigabit LAN.

Factor in the management required to keep the service running versus just deploying the service and then focusing on your business.

Not to mention the hardware is likely to be of higher quality than that of a dedicated server. Not to mention faster storage, scalability and reliability of the system in general.

[alemcherry]

Cloud hosting ideally would be a lot better than dedicated server for larger websites. Personally I don't have any experience with it and would like to hear from someonw who has actually hosted with them. One possible issue is session handling.

Managing a server cluster, especially for a growing site is no easy task. For sites with millions of page views per month, even a two server set up wont be enough. Load balancers, DNS management, database replication, making codes that work on a cluseter etc. can take lot of time and efforts. Cloud hosting should help in such cases.

[yangyang]

Actually opposite of 'too good to be true', I heard quite some negative reviews regarding the slowness of their Cloud Sites plan. But that's just now, may not necessarily be so in the past or in the future.

I'm currently on their Cloud Servers plan right now which I'd say is quite good. The responsiveness, reliability, customer service and almost everything else exceeds my expectations and beats all my previous hosts. Definitely recommended.

[01globalnet]

Although, Rackspace is a "premium" provider - Mosso tends to have issues every day while I had been watching them from the beginning until a few months ago... Just check http://status.mosso.com/ - there are issues EVERY day...

You should also take into consideration the computing cycles - if you have a very busy website, the bill can go up up up...

You can also search around for other shared cloud providers (nothing to manage, like mosso), they have better uptime and none-to-very-few issues.