My Move to Mosso and GMail: Part One
I have used many web hosting companies in the past, and always used Plesk as my choice of a control panel. It seems the same thing happens every time with a new web hosting company: at first the service is great and the resources are fast and responsive. Over time, quality degrades as resources are spread thin. Then the inevitable happens where the hosting company wants to up sell me on my current solution. There is always a point where one needs upgrade a web server, but there are also times when you have to ask “if you can’t manage my current solution, how do you expect to sell me on a bigger and more powerful solution.” I have reached these cross roads with my current hosting provider, and have not been impressed with the way they have handled major problems over the last several months so I am once again switching providers.
I have always wanted to be in control of my hosting solution, a nice balance between an easy to use control panel and the back end scripting to optimize things. Lately my time has been too pressed and too valuable to continue taking on the “server management” roll as well as wear many other hats. Sure, I could pay someone that knows 100 times more than me in the area of server management, but that’s more expenses on top of the actual box that I am already paying the hosting company to keep up and chugging.
So I have reached the point where it’s time to outsource. My plan is to move the many sites of mine, and the ones for friends and family, over to a new scalable solution that I need to have very little hands on work to make it… well work. The same goes for email, I am sick of tweaking spam filters and managing quotas for in boxes and worrying about uptime and downtime. So what’s the answer? Well for me, the plan is to migrate my web sites over to Mosso and my email over to GMail for your domain. Shouldn’t be too hard right? Well, we will see.
So why did I choose these solutions? Here is a little break down.
Mosso:
Mosso has an interesting approach to web hosting. For $100 you get a an all-in-one, scalable, flexible, hosting solution, for an unlimited number of domains. Sounds goods so far, but not unique. Well not so fast, Mosso takes the guess work out of the Linux vs. Microsoft debate and choice that one has to make when choosing a host. I have always preferred Linux servers for my own reasons, but I have freelanced on projects for a Microsoft shop that I need a real work test environment and have had to lease a server for a month or two at a time. Mosso has it all, and in one package. Furthermore any site can use PHP4, PHP5, ASP, or Python under one domain name… yup that’s right the ability to run multiple scripting languages and database back-ends under one site. Mosso has built a multi million dollar, and very unique solution giving you choices. The cherry on the cake is the very slick, powerful, and easy to use control panel that will make it easy to manage it all. There are some set backs however: You do not have SSH access, you do not have access to cron jobs, and no support for Ruby on Rails yet. These are minor set backs for me, and I have already researched work-arounds. While kicking the tires of the Mosso service over the last several months, I have learned that the support staff is friendly, hel, and fast to respond.. a big plus. Add on their service level agreement, that’s just about all I need.
GMail for Your Domain:
This one is easy: it’s Google, Gmail, it’s free, and my domain. There is really nothing more that needs to be said. I have yet to come across a scalable web mail solution, and am tired of bringing down IMAP servers with the large amount of mail I have. Add in GMail’s spam filtering features, and again… done deal.
Conclusion for Part On:
I am hoping that this move will go smooth, and for Mosso it could be the best real world client story and review yet. I have HyperSpin setup to monitor the performance and uptime of the new web host, and it should line up nicely with the re-launch of BlueCrestStudios and NetGrid. Stay tuned for further developments…
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Comments
Media Temple BLOWS. In the first 2 days of having them, everything went down, and they were ridiculously slow to respond or explain. I cannot stress enough how terrible MT is. I have no idea why they have such loyal customers, as their service is truly truly awful. It’s too bad, because their control panel is very nice to use.
@Dan Sheetz:
I’d like to know more about your experience on our hosting services. Were you hosted on the (gs) Grid-Server or a (dv) Dedicated-Virtual? There have been some issues in the past which we’ve expressed clearly on our weblog (http://weblog.mediatemple.net/). At this time, things are improving in a very positive way. If you’re interested I’d be extremely grateful to listen to any feedback you have regarding our hosting services, technical support expectations, etc. If you have a specific support request number, I can definitely take a closer look for you as well.
Best,
–Arman Z. - (mt) Media Temple, Inc.
@Yanay
I appreciate you feedback, and you would never be raining on my parade.
I have done a lot of research on both Mosso and MediaTemple, and I am fairly confident in Mosso… I could end up being dead wrong, but like I said in the article this could be the best or worst press for Mosso because I will be blogging my experiences during sign up and transition in part 2, and then a follow up after several months on the service quality in part 3.
[...] has been a month of changes here for my. Moving mail solutions, changing desktop OS’s, and getting things ready for a relaunch of BlueCrestStudios in the upcoming [...]
@Matthew
Sounds good.
We can both keep this tracking going and compare impressions.
At best - it might improve both hosting companies, but if not - we’ll at least spare the trouble from a lot of innocent others 
Yanay.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Well,
Not to ruin the party, but I had a different experience with MOSSO. I too thought this will be a huge upgrade, since previous adventures with VPS hosts were less than brilliant…
It started off real sweet, with pretty GUI and the sense that since you actually pay the $100/mo, now you can actually expect more.
wrong.
The support has been poor for anything other than trivial issues. SSL certificate completely messed up some of the settings, and worse - they were clueless for weeks, as for what is wrong.
What’s worse, was that they started avoiding me, and not replying my emails, and their support ticketing system is not transparent to the user, so you have to tell them the whole story again, if you don’t have a ticket ID written between support chat sessions(!)
The whole “Hybrid”concept they offer, for someone who couldn’t care less about Windows hosting (I need only Linux), causes more limitations and unexpected results than help - so take this into account as well.
All and all - I think you better look for some more solid alternatives before jumping on this one…
Funny enough - I’m giving MediaTemple a shot now, and we’ll see how that goes
It’s one hell of a difficult market, and I think we all could use a hosting that actually does keep promises.. Until than…