Mosso So Far!

Posted by: Matthew on Wednesday, April 28, 2010

So I’ve been looking for a good way to save money on my hosting bill. Currently I’ve got a server based in Australia running Plesk 9, the server has been up and running for close to a year now with no issues to report. As Wandering Worlds has been growing recently and we’re experiencing 5-8% traffic growth month on month our little server is starting to max out.

Now adding more RAM to the current server is going to cost me around $100 for another 1gb. Now $100 may not sound like much, but I wanted to see if there were smarter options out there.

I first saw Mosso on Bwana’s FriendFeed stream, he had one of his posts linked by engadget and his site handled the traffic without a hiccup.

After checking out the Mosso site I noticed that they had a 30 day money back guarantee, plus a $25 off your first month promotion. I signed up on the spot!

Now here are things I like and dislike so far:

Like

- Hybrid Hosting Technology; the ability for me to run .NET on a windows server and PHP/Ruby on a Linux server, allows me so many more ways to provide solutions.

- Live Support; If I have a question I just click on live chat and someone is talking to me within 2 minutes, that is fantastic.

- Ability to remotely manage my databases via SQL Server Management tool is brilliant!

Dislike

- SQL Server Costs; $5 for 100mb of SQL Server space? Not even sure if that space is shared over all my sites or dedicated for just one. Do I need to spend $5 for every SQL db I require?

- All .NET applications run in Medium Trust; None of my applications run at all. Lucky I’m running this side by side with my Australian server because I’ve got quite a bit of work to do getting those web apps running again. Why is there no warning on the purchase page

- A little tricky setting up Full Text Search on SQL Server 2008

- No easy way to get a dedicated IP address; I need one of these for a client that has a special setup. The apparent way around it is to purchase an SSL certificate for $20.

 

So there you have it what I like and dislike so far about Mosso. Recoding my web applications to run under the Medium Trust environment is going to be a lot of work, but it’s something that maybe I should be doing anyway.