Anyone using Mosso - rackspace grid hosting??

Perhaps you could provide more details on the topic? Otherwise you just sound like someone who runs a competing hosting company who is trying to spread misinformation.

I've been using them for about 3 weeks now without issue (aside from the RewriteBase problem I detailed below that was solved by a technician over the phone).

I've been monitoring the site using http://mon.itor.us/ which shows a basic 4.7 site with caching enabled responds at around 300-400ms but never over 2 seconds and rarely over 700ms with 100% uptime so far. Those numbers are comparable to similar sites that I'm monitoring on other grid hosts or low end VPS servers or on some of the better shared hosts.

My major complaint is that they only allow ftp access. FTP is bad in my mind because it means my passwords travel in clear text across the interweb and I'm more efficient when I have shell access to the server.

--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log

I've been with Mosso now for almost four months. In that time I've moved over all of my clients from the various webhosts that I'd tried with varying degrees of success over the last several years (1&1, GoDaddy, LunarPages, Verio, Sprocket Data, my own servers, etc etc ad naseum) and Mosso has been absolutely fabulous.

Why?
1) Tech support: the guys I talk to are all cool, not in a hurry, know their stuff, and most importantly they speak English.
2) Database speed: Mosso DB servers are the antithesis of the glacially slow GoDaddy servers.
3) Managed billing and 24/7 client support: this rocks. I don't have to deal with invoicing and my non-billable/tech support phone time with clients is almost null.
4) Fast provisioning: I got used to waiting an hour for a database or site to be set up with other hosts. With Mosso, 5 minutes, tops.

FWIW, I'm responding to a months old post because IMO Versatilist's opinion is dead wrong. I can't speak to Mosso's quality back in April 2007, but in January 2008 they've drastically reduced my hosting headaches and made me a very happy camper. I don't know about most folks, but I work on the billable hour, so time is quite literally money. The less time I spend jacking with web hosting the better as it's a necessary evil in this business.

I'm in the process of moving a bunch of my stuff from a low-end unmanaged dedicated over to MediaTemple (gs).

I'm currently using the most basic setup, which includes what they're calling MySQL SmartPool v.2. It took me a few minutes to figure out where they put things on the system, but after that, I've had no problems. My sites have been snappy and responsive- even on pages with lots of dynamic code, and so far I don't have any need to upgrade to one of their MySQL gridcontainers.

Just FYI, I'm a web developer- and this point, focused almost entirely on Drupal. I'm doing a fair amount of custom module development and tweaking of other contributed modules. The grid server is a great solution for developers; you get a fairly high performance host with a sizeable chunk of bandwidth and space on a "clustered" computer, without the hassles of patching your kernel or upgrading PHP every time a bug fix comes out. That's what drove me nuts about the unmanaged dedicated setup. I know enough to poke around in SSH, and I can figure out how to do upgrades, but I'd rather focus on my development and building my business. For those who were wondering- the (gs) environment allows shell access, but no root.

When I ran into things I didn't understand over the first little bit, I was quick to call tech support, which seems to be staffed by American geeks who were totally willing to chat about how the system works. BTW, I was never more than 1st or 2nd in line, and it moved quickly. From my research online, and chatting with the tech guys, it sounds like this arrangement is far superior to most shared systems, because they can automagically load-balance across the entire cluster so you don't have the "bad neighbor" effect that a lot of these types of setups run into. You also get 1000 GPUs per month, which is a measure of CPU usage. Overage is $0.10 each, and I believe use of 10% of the capacity of one of their cores for an hour is around 1.4 GPUs. I'm a little hazy on exactly how it's calculated, but so far I won't be close to the allocated amount as the end of the month nears.

I realize this sounds like a commercial for MT, but consider I was spending around $100 a month for a crappy dedicated host with no bells and whistles, and here I can get superior performance and service for about a fifth of the price ($20). I was convinced that to fulfill my needs, I'd need to spend a lot more. But so far so good... The one thing this might not work so well for is if you develop sites for clients and then need to provide them hosting once complete, because you can't break out a separate control panel for them, and the functionality here is otherwise a little kludgy. I've been told that their dedicated virtual is the way to go here, but I'd personally be tempted to look at something like mosso once it got to that point.

Hope this was helpful! For most of us, I'd really recommend going with something like MediaTemple for just a tiny more money than you'd pay in a strictly shared host.

It seems that mosso defaults php memory limits to 16MB, but that is often not enough. Fortunately they allow you to control this in your settings.php or .htaccess - see the handbook page on resolving the "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate Y bytes)" error for more details.

Other than that (and a database hiccup this morning) my experience is still relatively positive.

--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log

This is a thread to discuss mosso. If you want to discuss hosts in general I suggest 2007 Hosting evaluations and recommends.

--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log

Thanks for adding to the knowledge base.

I didn't have this exact problem - I did need to put in the RewriteBase as mentioned earlier but not the second set of rewrite rules that you laid out. I don't have the problem neither for sites in the main directory nor for subdirectories.

--
_{Open Prediction Markets | Drupal Dashboard | Learn more about Drupal - buy a Drupal Book}

Can you give some more details on what this sharing might look like? So far if it's $10/month for you plus some additional fees then that doesn't sound like a very good deal.

If it's $10/month for you and then you only charge an additional amount for features which cost you money then it does seem like a reasonable way to use their service (I haven't checked the TOS to see if this is allowed or not).

Also, I talked to the Mosso representative who came to Drupalcon who was a really nice guy. I mentioned that for me there are two features which are major "show stoppers" before I can use their service more extensively. These are:

1. The ability to point multiple DNS entries at the same filesystem path. This would allow me to take advantage of the multi-site feature of Drupal which is important to me to reduce the time I spend doing maintenance.
2. The ability to "ssh" into the servers to be able to do things like use svn and cvs to manage my sites or use tar and drush. I know that was a deal killer for davidstrauss as well (he put the product brochure back on the table after hearing about the lack of this feature!).

He said that these "were priorities" and would likely happen later in 2008. Promises are easier to make than change, of course...

--
_{Open Prediction Markets | Drupal Dashboard | Learn more about Drupal - buy a Drupal Book}

I have a (mt) (gs) running millwoodonline.co.uk and spundesigns.net (under development) both of the same drupal install, but i have used many symlinks.

It's not really publicized, but they do have a status update blog at http://status.mosso.com/

~silverwing - I'll give them credit for being at least a bit transparent!

_____________________________________________
Land of Midnight | MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS

There's some recent feedback about Mosso hosting on http://buytaert.net/drupal-in-the-cloud (read the comments thread).

They scale you up to multiple hosts, I presume that means the sql database sits in one cluster and your drupal site sits mirrored on a variety of machines to which they load balance requests, or do they do it some other way?

How do you do all this without shell access? How do you install modules, just copy them over? If you can install php code and run it, why isn't that going to give you as much access as shell does?