Review - Mosso Web Hosting
Corby SimpsonEditor’s Note: Mosso are a FreelanceSwitch sponsor, this review was written by Corby Simpson, a freelancer who we interviewed in September who volunteered to write about Mosso. This review was unsolicited and unrelated to our relationship with Mosso.
As a web developer or designer, there’s no better way to make some extra money than by providing website hosting for your clients. It can be as simple as an invoice and when you have enough clients, you can just watch the money roll in to early retirement!
However, there’s a decision to be made and it’s this: “Who am I going to rely on for hosting my websites?”
There are so many options to choose from. You can choose a cheap $20/month “Host unlimited websites” provider that you will no doubt have problems with as you grow and require technical support (Been there, done that!). On the other hand you can purchase an expensive dedicated server as long as you know how to maintain, manage and operate it…
Or there’s another option. Mosso Web Hosting.
Mosso is not your typical hosting provider. They have positioned themselves for people who make websites. If you’re looking to be a private label reseller and want to control every feature and detail of a server, they’re not for you. However, If you make websites (as many of us do) and you want to provide robust and problem free hosting for your clients, then keep reading.
I don’t want to be a network administrator and I don’t want to deal with technical server issues. That’s why I’ve chosen Mosso.
I’ve actually set up two separate accounts with Mosso over the past year and so far they have been incredible. I’ve never once had a problem and that includes hosting projects for some very large clients. On occasion I need to contact them with a question about technology and their toll free number is always answered quickly. Even their live chat is fast. Their techs are very pleasant and responsive on the phone, especially Mike who I’ve dealt with on several occasions. They go out of their way to make sure you’re satisfied.
As a customer of Mosso I’m very happy with their service and quality. While they are not your $20/month budget provider, all you need is a handful of clients to cover the expense and the rest is easy profit. They take the worry out of everything and to me, that’s worth their cost.
Hopefully Mosso will continue to provide the level of service and support that I’ve grown to rely on. If so, they’ve got a lifelong customer!
Special Offer: Additionally you may be interested to know that Mosso currently has a promotion, More Details here
Ryan
November 28th, 2007
Good post. Could use a bit more detail though. Did you have a lot of problems? Sounds like you spoke with Mike quite a bit.
Also, what if I am looking for an affordable private label hosting reseller? Any suggestions? I still don’t want to have to mess with all the technical details of a hosting account, I just want it to work.
Collis
November 28th, 2007
We tried selling web hosting for a while and I must admit I hated it, and still haven’t managed to get rid of all our hosting clients. I think selling hosting can be very profitable, but you have to be an organised person, charge a high markup and be in it for the long haul, because it’s very hard to get rid of web hosting clients once you have them
Rian Orie
November 28th, 2007
What Ryan said! hehe. It’s a bit skinny as far as a review goes but it’s worth checking out, I for one will.
Mark Abucayon
November 28th, 2007
I think selling hosting is a good business, In fact their are many people needs it and buys it for their business…Mosso I think is a new hosting company I guess? But I think this is nice a guarantee us for our hosting. Thanks
Gary
November 28th, 2007
There hosting might be good but their marketing leaves a lot to be desired. MOSSO contacted me some months back about advertising their product on my website. I agreed to their 5 day trial with me, when it was finished I emailed asking if they wanted to continue and got no email response whatsoever. They took their 5 day free trial and ran.
Very poor.
concept47
November 28th, 2007
It looks promising … but $100 is a lot to pay especially when you can get a dedicated server from $69 from theplanet.com. They could do a better job too of selling their service. They focus on their technologies and the story about white label hosting but
what people like me (developer want to know are)
Is MySQL or PostgresSQL available … what versions? can I run multiple versions?
How does that play with their control panel?
What version of Apache are they running? Am I only tied to that version?
(Apache 2.2 can be run with Mongrel instances for solid Ruby on Rails performance but does play well with PHP last I checked)
Do I have SSH access?
Do I have root access?
What version of PHP are they running?
Does it have subversion? Can I create repositories?
Am I not your target demographic?
I couldn’t find these answers immediately and I couldn’t be bothered to look too much harder, because the deal wasn’t that compelling for me. Maybe they’ll sweeten it up in the next year or so.
Doug S.
November 28th, 2007
For $100 I’d expect more in starting stats. They don’t seem to offer more than my current hosting and, in a lot of cases they offer less (Servage.net). As for tech support, I’m usually gotten back to within an hour, the most I ever had to wait was 2. And that was over an e-mail issue and the reason it had taken so long was they’d transferred my account to a new server (I never noticed the down time) that had just been put in and ran much faster.
Never had a complaint since.
Joe
November 28th, 2007
More details would be great. You mentioned “hosting projects for some very large clients”, is this with high volume traffic? How consistent are their server speeds? Can they handle high sudden burst of traffic?
Also you didn’t mention anything about their unique hosting platform allowing you to use whatever technology of platform you wish. Does this work well? No mention of there client invoice billing system or their “support for you clients”.
If possible I’d would like to see a follow up with more detail.
tiffany
November 28th, 2007
@concept47 and doug s: the whole point of mosso is that they handle a large part of the server admin, and will also offer support and billing to your clients. they’re cheaper than most managed server companies and many dedicated server plans. i haven’t used them, but i think they offer a pretty good price for the product.
Dave
November 28th, 2007
We’ve been using Mosso for my IT company (http://www.trimegatech.com), and have been very happy. I’ve been through a ton of hosts, from Pair to Media Temple, to many many more. We originally had clients on Media Temple, but once they moved over to grid, it seems like there is latency to the sites I have hosted with them…support got worse, etc. (Disclosure: I still have a few sites hosted with MT).
Mosso has been great so far, and any issues I’ve run into have been resolved quickly through their live chat which has 100% of the time had somebody that is friendly, knowledgeable, and can usually resolve any issue pretty quickly.
I haven’t had any sort of Digg-like/huge spike traffic on any site that’s on Mosso, so I can’t speak to that….but so far so good.
Gabriel
November 28th, 2007
@concept47
It does not seem like you are Mosso’s target demographic. It would appear you like to handle a lot of the tweaking yourself. To answer some of your questions:
MySQL or Postgre? MySQL yes, Postgre no. MySQL is either 4 or 5, but a specific version (eg, 4.1) is not provided. You can select what version you want per database so if you have multiple databases running on one site you can use multiple versions.
SSH? Nope. They say it is one of their most popular requests and they are working on it, whatever that means.
Root? Only web root for your account, not server root. You can write .htaccess files but cannot configure anything into the programs.
Subversion? March 08 at the earliest.
I do heavy administration on other servers and wanted something that took care of stuff for me. Yeah, there are some things I really do not like (mainly no ssh or sftp access) but I am willing to put up with. Overall I am happy with Mosso and they have been trouble-free for the five months and 12 sites I use them for. I know earlier in the year they had some problems but I haven’t read about anything major since April.
Corby Simpson
November 28th, 2007
Since everyone is asking for more details here’s some more info. I was actually holding off commenting because I was having some technical issues this morning with MOSSO. One of two things was going to happen… I was going to ask Cyan to retract my review OR sing them more praise.
Well, I’m happy to report some more praise. I was speaking with a fellow named Roland using the live chat. The technical issue is not important, but here’s what is. How often do you purchase a product and when there’s problems you get caught in the finger pointing game? Your computer stops working and you call tech support. The manufacturer points the finger at the software? You call the software, company, they blame micro$oft… and so on…
Well here’s the deal. I was on live tech chat help this morning for nearly 2 hours with MOSSO. 2 HOURS! Not only did the senior IIS admin solve the issue (SMTP setting issue with a component), Roland also assisted in looking through my code to pinpoint another issue. He was quick to point out he was not the best ASP coder (fair enough) but was 100% willing to help find the problem. Now I know that Writing code is not what MOSSO is there to do and I don’t wan’t to indicate for a second that this is their business to troubleshoot your code, but Roland helped however he could.
As for speeds… I’m currently developing a video transfer tool and am pleased to report than download speeds are ballpark 1MB / second. I can move a 100MB video in only a few minutes across the country. I’m way up here in Canada too!
IIS and APACHE works great. One feature I found very cool was that I can change the IIS folder permissions with CHMOD in my FTP application! I thought that was Apache only.
I’ve never used the client invoice billing system or their “support for you clients”. feature. Honestly, I’ve never need technical support for my clients. It’s practically lights out operation. I did speak with Mike a few times when getting set up last year. He actually walked me through some of the control panel over the phone. He was friendly, spoke perfect english and built my confidence that I made the right choice.
@concept47 - Sounds to me like MOSSO is not for you. Simple as that. But I will say that I’ve used MS SQL Server, MYSQL and have messed around with a number of features with MOSSO and I’m very pleased so far.
Joe
November 28th, 2007
Corby Simpson - Thanks for adding more details! Speed is always my major concern when using a gird or shared servers. Sounds like they have a good handle on it though, I think I’ll give them a try.
VonSkippy
November 28th, 2007
Web Hosting Talk’s Forum (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/index.php) is a good place to get the “skinny” on any hosting topic. They have a bunch of oldtimers that quickly jump on any unsubstantiated boasts, and quickly spread the word on any problems in the hosting world.
But you don’t need to be an engineer to understand the “hosting game” - it’s very simple - you GET what you PAY for. So all of those nickel and dime hosting plans that promise the moon quickly wilt under any type of load or traffic demands.
Mike Johnston
November 30th, 2007
That Mosso review has got to be a paid review. I can not imagine you have spent the last year hosted there with zero problems.
Their cluster infrastructure is a complete disaster. Don’t take my word for it. Contact them and ask for a 30 day demo before you buy. Then cruise the user forums. Disaster.
Mosso cost my business money and almost caused me to loose two major clients. Don’t be fooled by the Rackspace infrastructure or financial backing. They are not active partners in Mosso.
Corby Simpson
November 30th, 2007
Mike Johnston - I can assure you that my review was not paid or compensated in any way. No free hosting, no cheque in the mail, nothing. Just my experience after dealing with MOSSO for about a year.
Corby Simpson
November 30th, 2007
P.S. Mike - Would you be kind enough to explain the challenges that you had with MOSSO? I’m always curious to know since I am placing my business in their hands as well. While I’ve had great success such as myself, I cannot speak for everyone.
Tony
December 5th, 2007
I can’t believe you guys actually had the balls to call that a review. It was entirely pointless, other than to get you guys to get more clicl-throughs to your sponser. Shameless.
Jake
December 5th, 2007
We attempted to host with Mosso and it was a disaster. I was always on the phone with support about problems with their “hybrid” hosting package. At the end of the day I felt as if I was paying for the right to beta and stress test their cluster package.
If anyone wants to follow up on their problems, simply ask to be a forum member before signing up. You’ll see the complaints from numerous other clients as well.
In summary, it’s a great idea and a pretty website, but they just can’t deliver.
black google
December 6th, 2007
its nice i will try it
michelle
January 5th, 2008
We’ve been with Mosso for 5 months now. We are NOT pleased. They seem to have problems daily - database server issues, connectivity issues etc… We have been losing a lot of business because of them.
Inigo
January 9th, 2008
Michelle,
We’re a little new to the industry (about two years now), but we’ve been having really good luck with Dreamscape Multimedia (http://www.dreamscapemultimedia.com) so far. We chose these guys because they actually pay you for hosting your websites with them (50% monthly!) They seem to have a pretty robust package (plenty of space, cpanel, Fantastico, blah, blah, blah) and so far, so good. The only disadvantage with them so far is that sometimes we have to wait for a callback on support issues, but they seem to always get back to us within the same day. We had one issue with a customer not being able to access their email for a couple hours, but it turned out the customer lost their favorite web-based email client when Dreamscape’s datacenter upgraded its version of cpanel. The client adjusted to one of the other interfaces well enough. As far as database, server performance issues or anything like that, they’ve been spotless.
p.s.- We know what a bad host is like. We were with a local company before moving to Dreamscape Multimedia and had mucho problems. A backhoe took the local company down one month, then a couple months later, the owner went on vacation and support went down the tubes. Our customers were screaming, we were screaming.. it was gross. It doesn’t matter who you pick for a web host, so long as they take care of you and your clients (it’s your reputation at stake, after all.) If you’re not happy your web host and you’re losing business, you need to get out ~immediately!~
Good luck!
Inigo
Mosso Reseller
March 18th, 2008
Mosso too expensive? If anyone is interested in sharing the cost of Mosso with me, I’d be willing to set you up with one (or a few if needed) of the client accounts for a good price. Just need a few people to help offset my costs. I’m thinking $10 for me, plus the set fees at Mosso (for example, $5 for 100mb of MS SQL, etc). I can be flexible with price depending on what you’re looking for. I’m willing to set you up with unlimited email boxes and databases since they’re free anyway!
Please contact me at MossoReseller at gmail.com if you’re interested.
Mapper
June 30th, 2008
We use Mosso hosting for our site and LOVE it. We’ve been using them for almost a year now and have only had a few problems, but those were QUICKLY fixed once brought to Mosso’s attention. I’ve seen now where there are coupons online to get half off the first month as well. Here is one for 50% off from retailmenot.com: REF-OCO