Performance & Uptime

Raw performance and uptime are the two most important features of application hosting.  Ease of use shouldn't even be on the chart, but that is exactly what happen when I chose Mosso.  Mosso has been going through continuous growing pains as they progress towards Internet scale.  Mosso is great for blogs and simple web sites, however currently it is not a competent platform for Web 2.0 style applications.  I used them for during the entire development phase of RGB Daily and still experience outages that kept me from committing and testing code.  The rest of the team at the time (Moonrank), also found the lack of SVN support cumbersome. 

There were definitely things that I liked about Mosso.  I think the top thing on the list was the SAN, maintenance and headache free storage growth on the SAN was a critical requirement for RGB.  I tin the thing that wasn't so much fun was the lack of partitioning.  In the end you want to know that you have a guaranteed amount of CPU and RAM.  Over the past week we have been working with a new host that provides the following:

• Xen Virtualization and Shell Access
  
• Dedicated CPU and RAM
• Scalable SAN storage via Left Hand Networks
• VLAN and management via Interworx

We are pleased, but we have learned the hard way that talking about hosting doesn't buy you anything.  The bottom line is that there are a ton of solutions and what matters is if they meet your needs.  Also you will have to be comfortable with getting you're hands dirty if you want to get the most bang for your buck.  I should have taken to heart from Kevin Rose's advice, "Own your own hardware."  I would revise that slightly and say that it is important for you to have control of both vertical and horizontal scalability.  There are a few players in the market that allow you to do that.  Which one you choose will depend on your particular requirements and architecture.  I will share that list:

• GoGrid
• Linode
• Slicehost
• Joyent
  
• Voxel

I leave you to do your own research.


Original post from May 7, 2008 ( Was previously hosted on Wordpress @ Mosso)

Choosing a Host

We are feverishly trying to wrap up the first alpha release of RGB Daily.  We will be starting a private preview release once we get the latest code settled on our new host.  We evaluated several options for hosting including both dedicated/virtual servers and managed solutions.  In the end we decided that the best architectural solution for our needs would be a clustered LAMP solution.  Building out own multi-tiered clustered solution is not something we are interested in doing, so managed was the only choice for us.  Also we wanted a solution that would be able to grow with the demands of a growing user base and their data.  We needed a system that had a manageable fixed price, but also was able to grow with us as our storage and bandwidth costs grew.

Potential Hosts

In terms of managed hosting with clustered architectures there are only really three choices.  Media Temple, Joyent, and Mosso.   I host quite a few of my personal projects on Media Temple and I am fairly satisfied with the low price and set and forget nature of everything.  At the same time there are quite a few deficiencies in the way they do things.  I experimented with Joyent for less than a month and they are not really a managed solution.  You really only get vertical scalability and you are responsible for keeping the lights on.  With most true managed solutions you really only have to worry about data integrity over time.  Services are stateless and come up and down, but the hosting company for the most part takes care of availability of your service.  At Joyent I found myself tweaking settings for an individual Apache instance.  This was going to scale into a ton of headache.

Mosso

In the end we went with Mosso. I’m not 100% sure of their uptime or overall performance, but I know that we can make the appropriate changes to out application code to take advantage of their solid architecture.  The fact that we have high speed SAN that is mounted across the web tier means that we can take advantage of aggressive file based object caching.  Also the MySQL layer is clustered - this means that we will be able to handle high load and can get away with expensive queries as long as we cache the results.  There are a few hot spots in the code base right now that we will be cleaning up overtime.  To keep things simple though we will only be caching for right now.

Key benefits of Mosso:

• $100 base hosting with cost effective paths to growth
• Rich platform for applications (LAMP/.Net)
• SAN storage that can grow without the complexities of managing storage
• Clustered Apache & MySQL