Pie In The Sky - Where Mosso Has it Right and Wrong
February 20, 2008 by Jonathan
Where Mosso’s The Hosting Cloud Wins and Looses
Mosso’s The Hosting Cloud promises to offer all of the stability, uptime, and processing power of competing grid/cluster products without the management headache.
This is in distinct contrast to Amazon’s cloud computing services, they provide the machines and that’s about it. It’s up to the user to provide the OS, applications, support, and management of the servers.
Mosso has it right, and if cloud and utility computing is going to catch on, it needs to appeal to the masses. Appealing to the masses at this point on the Internet largely means usability. If it’s not highly usable to the target demographic you might as well wait to launch.
From what I’ve seen of the Mosso Hosting Cloud control panel, they’ve taken great care to make sure it’s easily used and implemented by anyone who’s used shared web hosting previously.
Some of the key problems of utility computing remain however and it’s a testament not just to how far we are from truly ubiquitous cloud computing. Web platforms weren’t designed from the ground-up to be highly scaleable. Which is unfortunate, but changing.
One of the biggest problems I see in the near-term is Ruby and Rails, while it will scale gracefully (look at Twitter for instance), it took a lot of work and dedicated resources to make it do so.
Mosso has decided to continue using LightSpeed as the service to handle RoR on their cloud, which being a commercial product is largely proprietary and not the end all of solutions.
The only other area that I would have liked to have seen additional improvement is the higher cost of entry into Mosso’s system. At $99 it stands toward top of list in terms of shared hosting, granted this is much better than any shared host you’ll find anywhere, but the fact still stands that at $99 you’ve got a whole new set of competitors than at MediaTemple’s $20 entry point.
For $99 in the hosting industry you can get a pretty powerful VPS, a very low-end dedicated server, or multiple shared hosting accounts. Of course the argument Mosso has is that for that $99 you’re in theory getting multiple (potentially dozens+) VPS style systems for your dollar.
Scaling up from that $99 is where Mosso is at an even greater advantage, their ‘overage’ charges are on the lower end of the line than other grid/cluster hosting platforms.
So while Mosso’s Hosting Cloud is a big step in the right direction, there are numerous additional problems that need to be solved before my dream of utility/cloud computing really comes true.
–
Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
–
Possibly Related posts:
- Pie In The Sky - Comparing Current Offerings
- Pie In The Sky - Mosso’s Hosting Cloud Launches
- Pie In The Sky - Where We Are Now
- Pie In the Sky - A Blog Series Examining the Future of Web Hosting
- An Outline of How Cloud Computing Should Work
Comments
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
-
OtherProfiles
