Pie In The Sky - Comparing Current Offerings
February 21, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Comparing Current Offerings
Amazon:
- Very Inexpensive (+1)
- Very powerful (+1)
- Recently had its first major downtime event (-1)
- Very flexible in terms of OS, applications, etc (+1)
- S3 storage service provides a good platform for archive storage (+1)
- Bring your own Machine Image is a good thing, use what you’re familiar with (+1)
- You cannot upload and download files using FTP/SFTP as with standard web hosts (-1)
- You’re probably going to need an outside management firm unless you’ve got a very smart admin on staff already. (-1)
Score: B, the biggest loss here is the usability factor, it’s not usable for your everyday web hosting needs. If there were a control-panel and management provided by Amazon this would be an A.
Mosso’s Hosting Cloud:
- Higher starting price point (-1)
- Very fair overage fees (+1)
- Multiple smallish downtime incidents have been reported (-1)
- Being a startup, they’ve got heart (+1)
- Usability is high with their easy to use control panel (+1)
- They haven’t been able to truly solve RoR scaleability (null)
- Reseller friendly, if you have an account you can sublease your resources to friends and clients very easily, including billing (+1)
Score: A-, Mosso has gotten closer than anyone else to being what I would consider a true cloud computing provider. The get bonus point for being usable and for being around more than a year or two. I hope they can implement a plan with a lower starting price point, and someone has to figure out RoR, hopefully it’ll be these guys.
MediaTemple:
- Low starting price point (+1)
- High overage fees (-1)
- Recent significant downtime, both scheduled and unscheduled (-1)
- “Container” technology and usage is effective, and usually efficient (+1)
- Beta (cs) Cluster Server is in the works that promises to ‘fix’ many of the problems with the current (gs) Grid Server (+1).
Score: B, MediaTemple is attacking the lower end of the clustered server hosting arena and are doing a good job of it too. Much of their early success is attributed to being featured on the popular TechCrunch site right after launch. MediaTemple is where my own sites are currently hosted and I’m very happy with them.
Others:
There are other cloud and utility computing providers out there, see Monday’s post for more information but I do not have direct contact or experience with them like I do the above providers. I encourage you to take a look at the others in the field, which are mostly on the enterprise (higher) level than any of my current projects.
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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.
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Pie In The Sky - Where Mosso Has it Right and Wrong
February 20, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
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.
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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.
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Pie In The Sky - Mosso’s Hosting Cloud Launches
February 19, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about what I thought “The Cloud” should look like, well my dream may just be coming true! A couple days after the post I was contacted by Mosso, which is the grid hosting component of RackSpace.
Mosso is releasing a new service that promises to have the stability and security of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud service, with the ease of use and support of a managed hosting environment.
I spoke with Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce last week about the possibilities and the plans and what follows is what he had to say.
Basically, Mosso has worked over the last few months to shore up issues and enhance the features available to their customers. The ‘Hosting Cloud’ as they are now calling it is the end-result of that work, with a new emphasis on billing for actual usage.
Mosso currently supports over 37,000 web applications on their cluster, so they’ve got some experience in enterprise scaling. Right now cloud computing is dominated by Amazon’s services, but what Mosso has done is take the power of the cloud and simplified its use, allowing customers to use standard web development tools and transports to build and update their web sites and applications.
One area that Amazon has taken a hit is their lack of control panel and controls in general, there are a couple companies who having created business around providing management for EC2/S3 controls, but Mosso has wrapped up everything you need into a familiar looking dashboard control panel environment.
In just a few clicks, and in 5 minutes you can setup a new web application on their grid selecting from Windows/Linux, PHP, MySQL and other technologies. Your application is then created on the SAN and virtualized to several servers to begin with. It’s then ready to be virtualized onto additional servers on the fly as demand and load increases.
Mosso has always been setup with the reseller in mind, and their new focus on The Cloud doesn’t change that, customers are still allowed an unlimited number of applications and databases and 3rd party billing support.
The pricing and marketing is where The Hosting Cloud really changes the business, they’re keeping the current $99 per month hosting fee, but dropping the overage charges to much more reasonable levels.
For your $99 a month you get 3 million requests, in and out. If you go over that, there’s where the power of the cloud kicks in, addition requests are only 3 cents per thousand (a very reasonable amount).
In addition to processing power, SAN storage space and bandwidth are also included in the base fee with low overage fees (25 cents per GB over your allocation of bandwidth, and 50 cents per GB of SAN space).
I’ll be back tomorrow with more thoughts on Mosso’s announcement and I’ll share some links to other posts about the launch from the blogosphere.
–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.–
Pie In The Sky - Where We Are Now
February 18, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
Where We Are Now
The pulse of the Internet is in a constant flux and we in the new and social media fields are no different. As the first post in my Pie In The Sky series I thought I’d provide you with some links and resources to get familiar with the latest advances and information having to do with web hosting.
While we can talk about Cloud computing, grid hosting, etc, the foundation of the Internet is being threatened right now by what’s called Net Neutrality. Now I have my opinions and ideas about it, but I don’t feel confident enough in my own knowledge so I give you some links to learn more. And you DO need to learn more about Net Neutrality
- Wikipedia Net Neutrality Page and US Network Neutrality
- Save The Internet: fighting for Internet Freedom
Of course the topic of the Pie In The Sky series is cloud computing/hosting. Here’s some quick links to more information about cloud hosting:
- An Outline of how Cloud Computing Should Work - (by Jonathan Coffman)
- Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing
Cloud or Utility computing is still in its infancy at this point but all signs lead to heavy adoption in the coming years. The technology behind stringing a bunch of servers together to share the load of processing billions of web pages at the same time keeps getting better, more reliable, and less expensive.
Perhaps the biggest success story of them all when it comes to cloud hosting is Google, they use tens (hundreds?) of thousands of commodity web servers to serve up the most popular site on the web to people of every country.
While many would love to hear Google offer such a service (and they may), we do have a few options right now. In fact, this site is hosted by MediaTemple on their (gs) GridService platform. It works quite well actually, my site is stored in a large Storage Area Network device and lots of servers have access to it at any given time. This allows my site to remain live and speedy in the event of a flood of readers coming all at once.
I’ll look at more of these services in the coming week but here are the major cloud/utility hosting providers right now:
- Amazon EC2/S3 is perhaps the most widely known and popular, they have fully adopted the utility computing but face problems with availability, speed, and a general lack of usability by all but the most experienced web developers.
- MediaTemple is the least expensive provider I’ve encountered and they provide a great grid hosting service.
- 3Tera offers enterprise level application hosting across a grid of servers.
- SoftLayer while not a ‘grid’ or ‘cloud’ hosting provider does offer many dedicated server options and load balancers so you could create your own Pie In the Sky. I’ve had servers with them in the past and they are my all-time favorite hosting company.
- ServePath offers grids of servers although I have no experience with them.
- Concentric also offers load balanced clustered servers for cloud computing
Stay tuned throughout the week for my blog series Pie In The Sky - Cloud Computing and the future of web hosting!
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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.
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Pie In the Sky - A Blog Series Examining the Future of Web Hosting
February 17, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
This week marks a major series of blog posts. All week I’ll be posting about my vision for the future of web hosting and the Internet itself. The series couldn’t come at a better time, web startups are everywhere again, personal computing and communication has been revolutionized, and creating connections between people, machines, and the world has never been easier.
Stay with me all week to get resources, tips, advice, vision, and more as I take a look at the Pie In The Sky, the future of web hosting.
The future is literally today as social networks and pervasive computing continue to dominate the online landscape just as we as a country continue to march toward an election season rife with technology issues that need to be taken care of.
Here’s a quick preview of some of the topics you’ll see throughout the week:
- Monday: Where we are now, the state of the Internet
- Tuesday: Major product launch and commentary
- Wednesday: Launch recap and review
- Thursday: Comparing cloud computing platforms
- Friday: Where the future of web hosting and the Internet lies
- Saturday: How Journalism, new-media, and social-media can take advantage of the future - Today.
In between major posts I’ll also be posting links and resources in micro-blog format to provide additional context, information, and commentary.
If you haven’t already, please subscribe to my RSS feed to always have the latest content. Alternatively, you can also subscribe to my blog via email using the form in the far right column.
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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.
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Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-02-16
February 16, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Dang, missed the party tonight. Oh well, I was finishing a The Wire disk anyway. #
- Getting my Blog series set up for next week, it’s going to be a big week on my blog #
- Headed out to run some errands this morning #
- If you get to the showbefore me tonight will you save me a seat? #
- A soup concoction is on the stove, it smells like a winner! #
- I’m going to sample it, let it cool, and get ready to go support my friend Kristy who is in the Vagina Monologues tonight (4 years running). #
- Wow, that last tweet might be considered ‘Perfect’, it was 140 characters exactly! #
- @annier good call, I like it. #
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