Site Migration to Mosso
If you're seeing this, your DNS has propagated and you're using the new Wynia.org, hosted by Mosso.com. There are lots of reasons for the move and it's been sitting on my TODO list for more months than I feel like admitting in public.
At any rate, I also took this opportunity to prune the site a little bit, starting with a cleaner Wordpress install and holding back a bunch of cruft from being set up on the new account. I'll be watching the 404 logs and restoring or replacing functionality that actually gets used. However, there was a bunch of stuff that didn't need to be on the site and that stuff is gone.
If my deletion removed your favorite feature or you find something broken, let me know. I won't necessarily restore it, but at least I can tell you so directly.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Hi,
I have read often posts from your blog and I see it is now hosted by Mosso.
Am thinking to move as well, so I would like to ask: what are your first impressions about flexibility and performance?
Thank you.
August 20th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
I was considering moving my website to mosso too, being backed up by Rackspace. But I heard people experience mysql problems, and not only with this company but with cloud hosting in general, even with Mediatemple.
Did you experience something like this? Wordpress relies extensively on mysql.
August 20th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I am glad to hear that your move to Mosso was smooth. If you ever have an issue and are considering an alternative to Mosso, I would totally recommend Joyent. They are the official host of Ruby on Rails and as a developer, I'm sure you can appreciate what they have done for Linked In's Bumper Sticker app they developed for Facebook. Their Accelerators make an excellent platform for Ruby, Python, PHP and Java apps.
August 20th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
There's clearly interest in why I chose Mosso and how things went, so I'm going to write up a bit more detail in a post tonight as an answer to these questions and the rest of what led to the choice.
Anyone else have questions about this move?
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:04 pm
I would love to fully understand the mySql issues between mediatemple, joyent, and mosso. I am currently hosting a group of sites at mediatemple and am considering going back to mosso. Mosso was great but for what I need the $20 + $20 for better performance sql is great.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I'd be leery of anyone doing performance comparisons between them as most conversations of performance of hosting services are dreadfully lacking in actual benchmarks.
The only way to really get a comparison would be to put the same database on all of them along with a suite of scripts to manipulate that data in the mix of languages that they provide. Then run load tests and measure how many transactions each can handle during the tests.
Getting that test right is not terribly simple.
August 23rd, 2008 at 11:27 pm
I agree that those would be the types of tests to perform. It would also be helpful to have a set of sql scripts that would create, load, then query data that one could test to see how well a host performs. We could all then share this info.
Now that is open source!
Thanks for the comments.
August 25th, 2008 at 6:40 am
So far, how is it going? Any problems?
March 19th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
After reviewing a number of hosting solutions (and reading your article) my company signed up with Mosso. We are now in the process of migrating 200 accounts, many of which are Wordpress sites. Yesterday we had problems decompressing ZIP files through the Mosso File Manager and called support. They indicated that this was a known issue and that we should use TAR compressed files. Today I tried uploading TAR files through the File Manager, as recommended. The File Manager did not work, with the preloader simply turning and turning. I called support again and they indicated that this was a known issue, that there was no timeline on when it might be corrected, and that I should use an FTP program instead. I was disappointed to hear "known issue" again so soon, but went ahead and uploaded my TAR files via http://FTP. Without access to the File Manager, however, I am unable to decompress the files once they're on the server. I'm otherwise quite impressed with Mosso and the easy to use control panel, but being able to upload and decompress files is going to be a requirement for migrating this many sites and I may have to look elsewhere.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:57 am
Sorry to hear about that bad experience. I've never needed to do that sort of upload where it was a big deal to just decompress before the upload, so I haven't run into that particular problem. I never really use their FileManager at all, but have never found one on a web host that was an improvement over using FileZilla and most disappoint.
That's one of the tricks in recommending technology. Everyone has varying requirements. When a service or product has 1000 features and no one uses more than 300, someone can be perfectly happy, make a recommendation and discover that there are hundreds of features that irritate other people, but since you've never used them, you had no idea.
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Thanks for the reply and recommendation. While I wasn't thrilled about the file manager issue I can't say that I've had a bad experience. Aside from decompressing files, I rarely use the online file manager tools, and the Mosso staff agreed to decompress my files during the migration. On the whole Mosso seems like a very good hosting solution and I would tend to recommend them to others.
Thanks, again.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I opened an account with Mosso and used it, or better tried to use it, for a while, but then I gave up.
Their service might be OK for some things, but it's horrible for others. For example, I would never recommend them to host Ruby on Rails applications. Apart from the cost - only after signing up I discovered that the monthly $100 included only one Rails site, and that from the 2nd on I'd have to pay $25 more each month, for each site - Rails support was *horrible*, both technically, and for the kind of technical support their staff could provide.
They knew close to nothing about Rails, and were unable to find out what was wrong with their system (about Rails, but also mySQL). After a too long time, one staff admitted that all of them were pretty new to Rails and that they were finding it difficult to sort things out properly.
That's not the kind of answers I was expecting - especially considering the additional costs for Rails sites (what would I pay $100 a month for, then??) - so I canceled the account and moved to a VPS on Linode, which am loving.