Including Everything Blog

It’s inevitable that a web host is going to experience downtime at some point. There’s little in the way of inexpensive options that will deliver true redundancy that wins over all possible failure paths a data center can experience in keeping a website or application online 24/7/365.

However, Mosso has claimed to have accomplished this feat for the past two years. For the most part, this has been true. I’ve pinged and tested websites hosted with Mosso, finding that while they are not necessarily the fastest host out there, I’ve chosen them to be able to withstand nearly any load we can throw at it.

But issues like today I am at a loss for words for. It’s nothing new either. I’ve called in, fully understanding that there’s an issue they’re experiencing, and simply need an “estimated time of resolution”. I’m not asking for anything definitive, but the generic run-around that I typically get reminds me of experiences from early web hosts (who shall be nameless for the time being). This is not typical Rackspace behavior and I think should be treated differently. You don’t put the reseller of your services on the back burner and play the silent game. It sets a bad precedent for your reputation handling customers.

The post from today in the Mosso status area.

So obviously I’m concerned about where Mosso is headed. I was quite literally about to rant about how amazed I am at their Cloud Files offering, however, it’s hard to praise and rant on the same day most of our websites are down. We pay a premium price for shared hosting which is supposed to be redundant enough that these types of embarrasing outages are 

I love the Rackspace brand, company, people, services…everything about it. But Mosso’s starting to test my patience and I’m beginning to doubt if their Cloud Sites service will ever be truly stable and ready for prime time. To compare, I have had a single processor server without issues live at The Planet for nearly a year and a half, not once down. If my little server beats out Mosso’s uptime hands down, why pay the extra buck for a service that hasn’t proven itself?

I’ve ranted about the “cloud” idea for a while in relation to Media Temple and Amazon S3. This post wasn’t originally intended to be a Mosso bashing. I’m a huge Rackspace fan. But they’re not proving themselves bulletproof in terms of uptime so far. Many issues have arisen, and I’m not sold on them as the most stable option for my hosting needs.

Bruce Runyan is the chief uptime officer for Mosso. I’d be interested to get a public statement posted here explaining why things like this happen when the idea behind this type of hosting is so that this doesn’t happen in the first place. To simply avoid calling clients that actually noticed the outage and not provide helpful information other than “We’re working on it” isn’t the answer paying clients are looking for.

So let’s extend this to other hosting situations beyond just Mosso with a few questions.

1. Are you with a host that doesn’t give the full picture?
2. How have you experienced uptime with them?
3. Is uptime or load processing more important?
4. Has the “cloud” idea disappointed you?
5. When will we finally be ready to trust it?

For the record, I’ve been overall blown away with SliceHost (although not Rackspace’s original idea), whome Rackspace aquired recently, and their uptime. I haven’t experienced a single issue with them and I was picky as hell when I contacted the owners out of skepticism a month ago. SliceHost technology will soon become Rackspace’s Cloud Servers offering.

Other related information:
Mosso.com – Information Thread on WebHostingTalk
Rackspace appoints chief uptime officer at Mosso

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