Hello All,
I am looking into Mosso http://www.mosso.com and am looking for feedback from folks who are hosting Drupal 5.1 with them. I talked to a sales guy there and he is asking permission from some clients to disclose a few that are running drupal so I know there are some.. It looks to be a solid option.

I have looked hard at Media Temple but they themselves told me on the phone they are still beta and have mySQL issues. So until they resolve things I gotta wait on them...

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Jeffrey

Comments

KMNL’s picture

its no good. leave now. worst host i've ever been with.

greggles’s picture

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.

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chrisrikli’s picture

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.

jeffrey.dalton’s picture

Please leave as many details as possible in your feedback so I can get a real idea of what the deal is.. "They Suck" doesn't help much...

What version of drupal were you running, what kind of problems did you have, etc, etc..

Regards,
Jeffrey

Jeffrey Dalton
Creative Director & Founding Partner
BKJ Digital
https://bkjdigital.com

Arman.mt’s picture

I have looked hard at Media Temple but they themselves told me on the phone they are still beta and have mySQL issues. So until they resolve things I gotta wait on them...

We're nearing our completion of the MySQL (gs) GridContainer beta and the technology will very soon be able to all clients hosted on the (gs) Grid-Server platform with (mt). Can't say exactly when this will be, but it's not months away if that gives you a better idea.

Furthermore on that point, general MySQL performance has also improved tremendously over the past few weeks. If you'd rather just wait for the containers, then it's not too far off.

=)

Arman Z. - (mt) Media Temple, Inc. - http://www.mediatemple.net/

geojaz’s picture

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.

geojaz’s picture

Oh, also, they have a 1-Click install for Drupal 4.7.6. I've had no problem with Drupal 5.1 sites, although you have to do the install the old fashioned way. I emailed them and asked them to include Drupal 5.1 on the list of gridserver "working" apps.

andjules’s picture

I'd love to know more about Mosso as well. Seems all these grid structures struggle with a few things, MySQL performance most notably (and most critically, for Drupal).

greggles’s picture

I'm now testing it out. I'll provide a more thorough post as time goes on, but right now I'll say one thing:

you need to modify the .htaccess file or else you will get 500 errors when you try to enable clean urls.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
+  RewriteBase /
 
   # If your site can be accessed both with and without the 'www.' prefix, you
   # can use one of the following settings to redirect users to your preferred

That line "RewriteBase /" is necessary on their servers, but is not present in the default drupal .htaccess file. I'm not sure if we should patch the .htaccess - I just know I had this problem on the php5.1.6 servers.

Also - apache runs as the www-data user. So, if you chown the files directory to www-data then it will be able to write to the files.

Other than that - performance so far (a couple hours) is comparable to a low end dedicated server. I'm very happy.

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greggles’s picture

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.

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Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log

jeffrey.dalton’s picture

I recently setup a clients Drupal site on http://www.opensourcehost.com and have to say in the few weeks I have been working with this account I have been extremely pleased. This has been the best dollar for dollar hosting I have seen at this level. Tech support answers questions within hours. All tickets are follow up up till closed and the support actually fixes things and helps you find answers.

I will try to post back in a few months and see if all is still well but so far open source host has proven to be well worth the money.

Jeffrey Dalton
Creative Director & Founding Partner
BKJ Digital
https://bkjdigital.com

greggles’s picture

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

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zooki’s picture

Hi,

I have been with Mosso for some time. Over a year now. ITs OK, but ,sometimes there are problems. I get server problems like "Node can not be reached" or something. But, that is not too much of a problem, it is a RARE occurance. Apart from that, the website is always running and quite fast. Infact, they do not mind how many SQL queries or CPU the website uses up. If I have 500 or 1000 or even 10,000 unique visitors it shouldnt be a problem.

The only limitations for me would be when I reach the bandwidth or space quota, but that is a long way off still. www.mosso.com

The service is really good though. Jeff, in the comment above said> "Tech support answers questions within hours. " -- Mosso has 24/7 online support and i have never waited more than 20 seconds to get in touch with someone. I am in UK and they have called me twice to tell me about some issues, and they are based in Texas. -- That is really good service.

Infact, they did things that they do not have to do, like helping me with software issues, looking and editing some my vbulletin files to get them to work! - So, the quality is great.

I hope that they can retain the quality. If they do, then they retain me as a customer! So, quality wise it is the BEST.

Mosso is good server for those who have websites that are no longer suitable for Free hosting, but are still not big enough for shelling out 400 dollars a month for truly dedicated.

- I have a busy vbulletin forum hosted with them and I am looking to use VBdrupal.

chrisrikli’s picture

Some folks are having problems with getting URL rewrites to work properly on their Mosso server. Here's how I got mine working.

My folder structure is like this
/www.mysite.com/web/content/drupal-5.x

On line 87 of the .htaccess file in my Drupal root I have the following line:

RewriteBase /drupal-5.x

This approach does require a .htaccess file in the content folder with the following:

Options +FollowSymLinks

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

# Don't loop.
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !^$
RewriteRule .* - [L]

# www.mysite.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?mysite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /drupal-5.x/$1 [QSA,L] 

</IfModule>
greggles’s picture

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.

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anantagati’s picture

I am using Mosso and I am very satisfied with their services.

Their technical support is wonderful. Disadvantage I found is that they don't offer shell account (this time they don't support sftp officially, but you can write them and they will activate it for you).

I had Grid hosting with Media Temple and it was horrible slow for me, than I moved to Bluehost before my Media Temple hosting year finished. With Bluehost I am still satisfied (good speed, ssh account), but they can turn your site off for a few minutes if it takes too much resources, so with Mosso there is not this problem.

mossoreseller’s picture

Mosso too expensive? If anyone is interested in sharing the cost of Mosso with me, I'd be willing to set you up with one (or a few if needed) of the client accounts for a good price. Just need a few people to help offset my costs. I'm thinking $10 for me, plus the set fees at Mosso (for example, $5 for 100mb of MS SQL, etc). I can be flexible with price depending on what you're looking for. I'm willing to set you up with unlimited email boxes and databases since they're free anyway!

Please contact me at MossoReseller at gmail.com if you're interested.

greggles’s picture

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...

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parrottvision’s picture

I agree, if anyone can get a grid style hosting set up working to support a multisite install I will dance like a monkey on the desk. Or does someone already offer this? I know you can multisite on (mt) but you have to symlink which is not ideal and doesnt promote confidence.

timmillwood’s picture

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.

parrottvision’s picture

Yes I also got Symlinking on media temple but now find my site is blowing out my traffic allowance so I may need to move. Shame as it works really well. I should have posted how here but here is the summary. http://www.markparrott.com/blog/multisite-drupal-hosting-mediatemple

anthonylv’s picture

This is an old comment but I'm sure others have the same question so here's my experience. To keep this in context, I should say that about 90% of our work is on Drupal-based sites. We also use Wired Tree and Rackspace as hosts.

We've been hosting Drupal sites on Mosso since around April 2007. Generally I'm very happy with them but they've had their problems. We've received no client complaints due to Mosso but had a few near misses.

Over the past year, there were five to ten outages that I've noticed. They usually lasted between ten minutes to one hour but one lasted for most of a day. The majority were caused by some sort of connectivity problem to the database clusters. One time a site went down because it had exhausted all the database connections. It was a very low volume Drupal site.

Once annoyance I have is that their proprietary control panel is extremely easy to use but a little buggy--sometimes it almost feels like beta software. For example, new site provisioning is usually a breeze but fails more than should be acceptable for a production system.

However, the problems are more than compensated by Mosso's friendly and helpful tech support. They are available 24/7 over live chat and usually resolve problems in less than 30 mins. Often they fix things while you wait during the IM session.

Overall, Mosso is great but I would be uneasy using them for my most demanding clients. Having said that, the majority understand that they'd need to pay a premium if they want that extra bit of reliability.

There were times when I seriously considered moving away but what stopped me is their top notch support team. It's my experience that every hosting company has problems. What's important is how they handle things when things are going wrong. With Mosso, I feel confident that someone is working to fix the issues.

silverwing’s picture

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

anthonylv’s picture

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

bradtem’s picture

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?

anthonylv’s picture

Mosso's site doesn't reveal much information about their technology, but your guess sounds plausible.

In practice, you set up accounts using Mosso's proprietary web-based control panel. It's very easy to use and works like a wizard, guiding you through setting the domain name, account features, and platform (e.g. LAMP, ASP, RoR). This process takes about three minutes, after which you need to wait a few more minutes while the account is set-up. The delay is probably the time it takes to replicate the account across the cluster.

Once your account is ready, you can create the databases and email addresses using the same control panel. To install Drupal, you need to extract the archive locally and upload the files by FTP or SFTP. This is, perhaps, the most annoying step, especially if you have a slow connection. The control panel has no extraction tool to uncompress the Drupal tarball.

(One workaround for we've found is to upload the tarball and create a cronjob to run tar. This can sometimes be more hassle than it's worth.)

While shell access would be useful, we've managed to do without it. It helps to have a feature-rich FTP client (like Transmit for OS X) that allows you to edit remote files, or synchronise local copies with those online.

anthonylv’s picture

As an update to my comment above, Mosso are working on a new control panel. This will include an online file manager that will allow you to zip and unzip files.

msacks’s picture

Jeffrey,
If you are interested in Mosso for cloud hosting you can read my formal benchmark and performance test of the service here: http://matthewsacks.com/techblog/2008/09/23/rackspaces-mosso-hosting-clo... . This may give you a better idea of whether or not it would be a good solution for your application. I will be posting more evaluations of other providers on there soon.

Regards,
Matt

greggles’s picture

I've heard a variety of people mention mail problems with Mosso where mail wouldn't be sent. I also had problems with this so I called their support who answered with a couple of ideas.

First is the use of the "-f" switch for sendmail and then being sure that the "From" address is set to a valid address which matches the "-f" parameter. See http://help.mosso.com/article.php?id=295 for more information.

Second was that they limit the number of mails that can be sent by a site to 250 per half hour. So, it's important to use some mechanism for throttling your mail so that you don't go above that limit.

I haven't tested these out just yet - hopefully they will be helpful.

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