Five things Mosso Web Hosting can do to improve

Recently I wrote about 10 things I love about Mosso Web Hosting. This article is about things Mosso can implement to make me love them even more.

1. Cron jobs
Haven’t really had to use them up until recently, you can of course work around the need for them but it’s not an ideal situation. Ideally cron jobs would be included by default straight in the control panel.

2. Hierarchical FTP access
At the moment I can access all my sites via the same FTP connection and the same username/password (which I absolutely love). But what if I want to allow a friend or staff member access to a specific site or directory within those sites and only that specified place? At the moment you just can’t do it, and it’s a big requirement of the majority I’d say.

3. PayPal billing integration
Integrating PayPal into their billing system would allow me to bill people who I host automatically instead of doing it myself. Unfortunately the masses don’t have Mastercard, Visa or American Express.

4. A development blog and/or road map of things to come
Whilst finding out about upcoming things internally makes me feel like ‘one of the team’ – it doesn’t tell everyone else about it. People visiting the site looking into the service would be much more impressed if they saw a road map showing what the company is working on. Whilst there’s a ‘but people will steal it’ complaint coming from someone – what other service is there like Mosso that could possibly steal an idea?

A blog and/or road map would vastly improve the site.

5. Small thing: statistics
In the control panel it will display ‘0 of 80.0 GB’, in my mind this would be much better if it said ‘931 MB of 80.0 GB’. This goes for all other statistics around the control panel too.

Also the control panel uses awstats, which is all well and good – but I feel that building something that displays information from Google Analytics, Feedburner or the like would bring web hosting based statistic packages into the current century.

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Comments:

  1. Hi, thanks for the Mosso insight. I am thinking about transfering my 25 web sites to Mosso. Some of the web sites are administered by clients. Does this mean if I send them FTP username/password, they are able to access all the web sites on my account? As far as I understand it is possible :/

  2. No no Jan not at all – you can setup username/passwords for the seperate accounts and that’s what people use to manage their individual accounts.

    My problem is that you can’t setup another username/password on top of that to access an individual folder inside the account for things like file uploading etc.

  3. I see :) Now it’s clear to me, fortunately FTP access works like I would need. I’m just waiting for .NET 2.0 support ;)

  4. Hi Jamie,

    Thanks for the review again :)

    Any good sites u know that i can learn more about Cron jobs?

  6. Hi,
    I came across your site looking for people’s comments about using Mosso as a hosting company. I understand you’re in the UK I think? How have you found it using a US based company for hosting sites? I really like their service but unsure about whether there will be any noticeable delays serving sites / email delivery etc. Any thoughts about this would be very helpful!

  7. Hey Rick,

    You’ll typically find 90% of hosting is in the US anyway, most sites you view (besides the obvious such as bbc.co.uk) you’ll be seeing from servers in America.

    Besides a short terrible time with a UK based host I’ve used US based hosting my entire time on the internet. There’s no delays in the service and it’ll typically load instantly just as any other site would :)

  8. Hi Jamie,
    Thanks for the feedback. I started using US based hosting years ago and I remember it always seemed to be fine (although I was inexperienced with hosting in general then!). I tried out MediaTemple’s Grid Server and thought it seemed to get slower during the day and had put it down to the trans-atlantic hop, though as it turns out I think that was actually MediaTemple having teething troubles with their system.

    The Mosso site itself seems fast and they also gave me a demo login for the Control panel. I was concerned about the support being in US but as it’s 24/7 it doesn’t seem to be a problem. I don’t think it can get any worse than the support I get for a VPS that I’m using now.

    Thanks again,

    Rick

  9. Yeah Media Temple seems like it’s having quite a few problems lately. You’ll also have no problems with Mosso’s support team.. they are the best I’ve encountered

  12. First, I love the design of your blog, kudos. I found your site from Web Hosting Talk because I’m planning to move our websites (asp/sql) this month and Mosso seems to be a possible choice. I didn’t know about the cron job part, so thank you. I really wish that Mosso will work for us too.

    Jan Horna: I just called Netfirms and got a really bad feeling when the salesperson told me they couldn’t make outgoing sales calls.

  13. Hi Jamie

    I’m in the UK too. Just wondering if you’d used Mosso’s client billing? In the knowledge base they say that you have to have a US domestic bank account. Is this the case? How did you get round this?

    Cheers

    Ross

  14. Hey Ross,

    I don’t use their automated billing system no as I heard it was pretty poor. I arrange payment via PayPal myself :)

  15. I’m researching Mosso for a possible switch. I actually live in San Antonio where they and RackSpace are based. I have seen some postings at other websites about slow loading and an email outage that last for a few days. Is that correct?

    On your manual billing issues, have you checked out freshbooks.com?

    Steven

  16. To add to Jamie and Rick´s discussion of UK vs. US hosting, ElasticHosts are a UK-based competitor to Mosso, providing UK-based virtual servers for all PC operating systems along with a complete suite of web hosting services. Our virtual servers are controlled from a simple web interface, which allows users to instantly scale up or down and to take snapshots of the entire running machine state for backup.

  17. You can scratch 1. and 2. off the list here Mosso added Cron jobs and directory restricted ftp access.

  18. Just what I was looking for, this was very helpful, thanks.

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