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Mosso out, Wired Tree in
Today I’ve completed my move away from Mosso Web Hosting to Wired Tree. It comes for several reasons which I’ll break down for you:
- Email:
Recently a client told me that he had lost complete faith because I couldn’t communicate with him via email, I couldn’t send anything to him and I couldn’t receive anything - it’s currently making the fix of a very random problem very difficult. Mosso moved me to their new email platform this morning and fixed the issue a few days ago. - Simple things:
Cron jobs, multi-user FTP access to domains, clients being able to setup their own sub-domains/addon domains, having to login to an external site to access a database instead of just clicking from inside the control panel to bring up phpMyAdmin. At the end of the day, it’s the little things stop me being able to host a client site I’ve just built permanently, or that take up my time having to re-train people. - Rails/Subversion:
It’s been in private staff BETA for a while now and when I joined Mosso I was told it would be coming very soon, therefore a hostee clinged on and I felt that it had been too long without this happening and didn’t want to mess around this hostee any longer. Plus - I want to play with Ruby on Rails and Sub version too.To be fair to Mosso they repeatedly told me I would be put into the BETA program for Ruby/Rails. But I was told two weeks ago, and the guy responsible for putting me into the program didn’t get in touch.
Mosso have been a great host, I took part in nominating them for an award and I submitted a testimonial for their upcoming testimonial page (I think this will happen around about the time of the blog). I was contacted by several core staff thanking me for writing about them, to find out more about me and just generally to see what they could do to better improve the service. And I believe I’m ranked highly if you search on Google for Mosso or Mosso Web Hosting.
I feel personally that there isn’t enough development coming out of Mosso for all the things customers are told and it could be improved upon by delivering small improvements (company blog, multiple user ftp, the testimonial page) whilst the larger ones (new email system, new billing system, Ruby support, JSP support, ASP .net 2.0) are being worked on over the long term. Again I’m not taking anything away from Mosso, this is just my opinion.
My new VPS on Wired Tree will allow me to provide Ruby/Rails/SubVersion, allow me to go back to cPanel with all it’s features and allow me to host clients who require it in the future. I also get the small things back whilst giving myself JSP support via the tomcat cPanel addon. So lots of room to learn and develop into new things which I always love to do - and hopefully some of these Ruby/Rails video tutorials I’ve been stacking up will get put to use and make some interesting posts over the next year.
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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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10 things I love about Mosso web hosting
The following article explains my love for the host that I currently reside with, and why I see myself staying for longer than my previous three hosts in the 4-5 months before joining.1. The support is excellent, every single time
Human support in a live chat environment, answered in less than 5-10 seconds every time upon opening a new chat. There’s always a friendly manner about the staff and there’s always that personal touch.2. I don’t have to fiddle with server settings or loads, but I still feel I’m on a dedicated server
There’s no mysql/apache updates to configure, no themes, no 50-60 tools to manage the server. But there’s the speed, the reliability and the raw power of having one. My account has never gone down and never have I seen a ‘out of memory’, ‘too many users connected’ or ‘exceeded max_script_execution time’ errors whilst being on Mosso. (And I’ve executed some looong scripts trust me).3. I’m not limited like I am with a server
I am not set to a strict amount of memory or CPU - I use as much as I need on their system and it allows me to do so without slowing down the service for anyone else. This is because of their clustering technology which (unlike Media Temple) has been executed incredibly well and works just how a perfect cluster system should.4. I can host all the sites I want
Their system doesn’t restrict you to a certain amount of accounts. I currently have 20-25 sites hosted (I don’t want to count an exact number right now..).5. Multiple core technologies all under one roof
Mosso currently supports ASP, PHP4 and PHP5 - not to mention Perl/CGI on PHP accounts. This is setup on an account by account basis. Oh - and I have word Ruby (with Rails) and JSP support are on the way soon :)6. Multiple database technologies all under one roof
MySQL 4, MySQL 5, MSSQL and ‘SQL Server’ (for ASP users). With more being worked on :) You can also have several types of database on one account - as the technology is defined when creating a database, not when creating an account.7. They are completely open to suggestions
Mention an idea to a support staff member and they’ll forward it to the founders for consideration. I mentioned they should have a blog and a week later, ‘we are planning a blog’ from a support staff member. This is truly unique when it comes to web hosts - as they usually just put user contributions to the side and go ahead with their own plan. Mosso is different. You can also e-mail founders directly (through a neutral e-mail) with your ideas should you have any.8. Better than average webmail
Mosso use an altered version of NutsMail for their web based e-mail. Which includes to-do lists, notes, contact management, a calendar, real HTML support and much more. After years of the crappy ordinary SquirrelMail, Horde (that one everyone never used) and NeoMail it’s refreshing to see a real web based e-mail program being included with hosting.9. They are in touch with their audience
An expansion from number 7 essentially - but when you’ve got live chat support with some of the friendliest people you’ll ever talk to and forums built directly into the control panel where you can talk to any other hostees, support staff and any other Mosso staff - it’s great. Unlike other hosts (how many times have I said that?) staff are actually around in these forums all day long.10. Everything is under the same FTP account
What do I mean about this? Well if I login now, I can access all 20-25 (no, still haven’t done that count) websites under my account. I can go into files.jhuskisson.com and then back into jhuskisson.com without disconnecting and re-connecting. All I have to do is simply navigate backwards and forwards again.Honorable mentions
- All mosso accounts come with billing support so you can bill your customers (credit card’s only though)
- You can configure welcome e-mails, billing e-mails etc. yourself
- 1 day free hosting for every hour of downtime - not much but it strengthens their guarantee
- Custom plans without hassle
- Very very nice appearance to everything inside the control panel and on their main site
- 80gb of space and 2000gb of bandwidth for $100 a month? And when you compare it with a normal server $100 isn’t bad at all
Note: This article is followed up by Five things Mosso web hosting can do to improve and isn’t the entire picture of my experience with Mosso as I am no longer with them.
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Problems with Mosso Web Hosting fixed - we now have a perfect web host
“Hey Jay - I was just about to give you a call, so I’m glad you opened up a live chat :) What can I help you with today?”. I’m sitting shocked - having just opened a live support chat with the extremely friendly support team (and available within 4 seconds every single time). I had previously wrote a post on their support forums frustrated at the very slow control panel on my first day and the fact that I had just lost $30 a month from a person I hosted because of it.
I had initially had a problem with two accounts not appearing in my FTP (and the hostees) upon me creating them. But I found myself spending a very pleasant 10 minutes talking to the two support guys I was randomly placed with whilst the problem was being fixed in the background. Normally all you’d get is an e-mail and then 3 hours later a reply, with generic terms and un-personalised chatter. Though saying that - the HostDime support team member that dealt with the canceling of my account was a personal reader of this blog and did everything he could to try to save me from moving away from them.
Mosso web hosting is quite far from the norm though. I found myself chatting about all the new features in the works, when they are expected, their roadmap they are on - and even had several of my suggestions listened to and passed around the office to the founders… everything you’d want from a support team. For me - it makes Mosso Web Hosting human.
With the control panel fixed I’m now officially in love with my web host - which hasn’t happened since ServerSeed was in it’s ‘prime’ and I had personal contact with the owner. The difference with Mosso is that every member of the support team seems like a founder, and it’s personal treatment everytime you open up that little live chat window.
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Welcome to Mosso web hosting Mr Huskisson
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- The support was always available. The forums worked and the live chat support popup link was there on every page for me to click.
- 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)
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