Jamie Huskisson Nottingham UK PHP, Magento, Wordpress freelance developer

I decided to take the plunge and move from my HostDime VPS hosting today. Why? Well it’s simple – I’ve been looking very strongly into Mosso for a long time.

Mosso offer a flat fee $100 a month service for 80gb hard drive space and 2000gb bandwidth. Not only this but they list enterprise level load balancing, a network that will ‘never die’ and a Linux/Windows hybrid platform to power it. This means that when creating an account for a site you can choose whether to put the site onto a PHP4, PHP5 or ASP.NET platform (by default). Though if you choose PHP4/PHP5 as your default, you can run ASP.NET files in the same physical directory as your PHP files. I had quite a few questions – and the live chat support staff (who answered within 5-6 seconds of me opening the window) answered them all immediately. It sounds like a perfect service… great support that’s impossible to find and a service that guarantees to never be down.

Pair all this with the fact that Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET 2 AND JSP support are in the works – it can only ever get better from here. In-fact 15 minutes after signing up I get a phone call from the middle of America – “Hello Mr Huskisson (yes they pronounced it properly!), I’m Nick from Mosso web hosting and I see you’ve signed up for our web hosting service – can I help you with anything?”. Wow! I’m still browsing the control panel and I’m already receiving a call welcoming me to the service? Brilliant!

Though I had just one question for the support guy on the other side of the phone – “Why is your control panel SO SLOW?”. “Yeah that’s a known issue, we implemented somethings that should make it faster but they aren’t having the effects they where meant to.”.

It went downhill from there… an hour or so later after moving 7-8 sites across onto my account and setting up numerous accounts for various different people I host… I started noticing things:

1. The control panel was getting slower and slower and slower as I went along – even clicking simple ‘let me see what’s on this page’ links took 1-2 minutes to load up the content.
2. Every account was set as ASP.NET/Windows by default. And changing to PHP4/PHP5/Apache I was told would take 1-2 hours to move the accounts. Great.. so much for instant setup if you want PHP and not ASP.NET.
3. The built in billing system for your clients you host has numerous complaints about it around the forums. I wasn’t going to be billing people automatically like I thought – it was straight back to manual collection with PayPal like I hated. (Though this led to me claiming numerous ‘back payments’ which turned out to be great).

After the pages started to take 4-5 minutes to load each time I clicked one – I began to get frustrated, left an angry post on their forum (yes, unbelievably their forums are lightning fast when their control panel isn’t – support is still reachable), contacted numerous support staff and let a few people know I probably wasn’t going to stay here long if it continued longer..

I then realised the good points of the service. Which are:

1. The site’s are loading like lightning. The control panels are clearly on a different system altogether – but as you only really use them for initial setup – I take this as a massive up point.
2. The support was always available. The forums worked and the live chat support popup link was there on every page for me to click.
3. Who else supports ASP and PHP on the same server without any silly hacks needed by the user? When JSP and Ruby support arrives – it’ll be nothing short of perfection.

In short.. it’s been a bumpy first half day, but when they start to get their control panel speed problems out the way – it’ll be one hell of a web hosting service.

(p.s. messy long post I know – but get used to it, it’s called blogging :P)