I got all excited this morning reading TechCrunch with their post about Rackspace Offerering Cloud Computing with Mosso. Once I clicked through to investigate further it seems the ‘new’ cloud hosting is just their old hosting plan with 30GB of storage slashed off (down to 50GB) so they can charge you 0.50/GB a month for any overage.

It’s the deal of the century!? a bonus $15/month to get back to their old limit of 80GB. Still no shell access, and still $25-85/month per Rails site.

I had high hopes for Mosso and Rails but after trying them I felt I was being nickeled and dimed, the lack of SSH didn’t bother me as they’re good about installing stuff for you, the kicker was $20/month if you wanted to add SSL. I also didn’t see marked speed improvements over shared (or grid) hosts like Media Temple (who host this blog, but not on the grid on a VPS).

All my Rails sites continue to be hosted on SliceHost, actually my secret recipe is a combo of Media Temple for email, FTP, and static stuff then either DNS trickery or .htaccess rewrites to apps on SliceHost. The best of both worlds.

Anyway I call shenanigans on Mosso.

My non-stop quest to find decent shared Rails hosting may be complete. I was pretty pumped about Media Temple’s Grid supporting Rails but each of the half-dozen RoR sites I’ve deployed to the Grid haven’t been ripping it up performance wise. An issue with an unresolved grid error when trying to cache pages had me scrambling to SliceHost. However SliceHost is bare bones, and system administration makes me want to shoot myself in the noggin. SliceHost did introduce me to LiteSpeed which - in my opinion - is the easiest and most stable way to deploy Rails. If I only had one app that I was working on full time SliceHost would be fine, I use Rails mainly to build CMS solutions for my clients so I still need email, stats, ftp etc. to be easy for them (not me) to manage. The brief was to find a shared host with all the bells and whistles that runs Rails on LiteSpeed with a healthy RAM allocation.

The choices came down to a VPS with Eleven2 or Mosso.

Why I didn’t go with Eleven2: they use Cpanel, hate it. They bat .500 with user’s hosting reviews, and I’m not sure which is worse; non-functioning forum, non-functioning server-status, or a knowledege base that has a grand total of 17 non-sales answers, hey at least the office cam was working (tip’o'the day: if your office cam resembles a 24/7 voyeur porn site it’s probably not boosting sales).

Why I went with Mosso: their custom control panel is as good as (mt)’s, rave reviews from a friend in the business, they can bill your clients directly for recurring hosting fees (second on my headache list after sysadmin), and so far their support rocks.

A hosting company is only as good as their support and in the first couple of days I haven’t been on hold once, two rings and in. On other hosts as soon as I uttered the words "Ruby on…" the fear in their voice would grow. Now not everyone at Mosso is a Rails expert, but when they said an expert would look into my problem they weren’t just trying to get me to go away. This afternoon I needed to get ImageMagick working on a Rails site, I called up support and within one hour ImageMagick was not only installed for my Rails site but for all Rails sites system wide (it should have been already, but that’s still pretty impressive!).

I’ll be keeping my SliceHost server for the heavy apps but everything else will make it over to Mosso (Rails, PHP, and even the two stray .NET sites I still have). $100/month plus $25 per Rails app seems expensive until you realize that any site that uses Rmagick or Typo/Mephisto on (mt) is going to require the $25 128mb upgrade anyways.

We’ll see how it goes but so far it’s been "set it and forget it" with Mosso.

PS deploying a Rails app on Mosso is pretty simple

1. Freeze Rails and any gems (which you should do on all shared hosts)

2. Upload

3. Reload your app in the control panel