Mosso Review: 1 Week Later

Apr 29, 2009 Author: Zander | Filed under: Hosting, Wordpress

So it’s been a week since I first signed up with Mosso. As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to leave the headaches of my dedicated server behind me, and give their Cloud Sites option a shot instead. I’m happy to say that their product works as advertised, and I think it’s going to be a great fit for us.

That’s not to say the migration hasn’t been without issues. I’ve moved 39 sites over to Mosso. It has been a MASSIVE undertaking (and I’m still not done!).. Their control panel really needs some work. For the casual hoster, it’s just fine. But if you’re a power user like me, you’ll get frustrated pretty quickly.

The biggest issue? They don’t have one-click installs (eg. Fantastico).. The process to install WordPress is entirely too time consuming! You need to provision the domain name. Then you create a database. Then you download WordPress onto your PC, and then transfer it to your Mosso site via FTP. Then you have to run the WordPress installation script to setup the wp_config parameters (database name, password, SQL host location, etc). Then, after all that, you get to go and setup your e-mail addresses. But wait, there’s more! If you’re using WP Super-Cache, you need to tweak your settings to work with Mosso. Then, if you want WordPress to be able to e-mail you (notifications, comment moderation), you’ve got to add a line to your .htaccess file.

Thankfully, that’s the biggest complaint I’ve got with Mosso. Their control panel is still a thorn in my side, sometimes timing out for no apparent reason. And I’ve had some provisioning hiccups where a domain gets added twice. But all in all, once you get past the setup headaches, it’s clear sailing from there on out.

CPU cycle usage was my biggest concern coming into this. Based on my calculations, I may exceed my 10000 cycle limit, but not by too much. (I’m saving $100/mo with Mosso, so even if I spend an extra $25 for the month, I’m still ahead by $75)

It would be great if you could get usage reports for a specific time period, but for now they only report usage since your last billing cycle.

If you’d like to give Mosso a shot, send me an e-mail and I’ll give you a referral code good for $25 off your first month. And as always, they offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so you’ve got nothing to lose!

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2 Responses for "Mosso Review: 1 Week Later"

Yang Yang June 3rd, 2009 at 5:57 am 1

I also suspect their 10k computer cycle might be the bottleneck. May I know how many page views in total across all of your sites in there that consume that much cycles (slightly exceeds 10000)?

Yang Yang´s last blog post: PHP: Convert Radians to Degrees and Degrees to Radians
Zander June 4th, 2009 at 4:05 pm 2

If only it was that easy. Last month, we did about 325K pageviews across our network, and used 22K compute cycles. But some of our blogs used more cycles than others in relation to the number of pageviews. Some of this comes down to database access/usage (the bigger the DB, the longer the search?), and even which theme and plugins you’re running.

I’m still working with them to try and figure out why two of my sites are using a TON more cycles than the other 30+ sites. It’s a struggle, but I’m confident that we can get this squared away.