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Mosso has become Rackspace cloud and although RAcspace is pretty expensive (their ClousSites start at $140/month) they definitely deserve to be on a spotlight. I would like to give you a feedback for another solution here. It is called Cloud.bg ( http://www.cloud.bg/en ). This is a High Availability hosting service fully automated with cPanel and allows for load-balancing of IP based virtual hosts. At this time (Q2 of 2010) it is the only cPanel enabled Cloud. When I say cloud I do no mean a bunch of virtual instances that are just flexible as a solution, but a Shared Cloud which allows Drupal site owners to use resources of a large Shared cluster infrastructure.

The Cloud.bg system assigns as many resources as a account holder needs and users pay only for the additional SAN/space and bandwidth used . The good thing is that the account is not capped and they can use a lot of processor time. There are already a lot of references fro this service and you can search the SE to find out more about it.

What was your reasoning for going Cloud Sites vs their Cloud Server flavour?

I've been playing around with Mosso cloud servers since they released the product and have been nothing but impressed at their setup and support.

For migrate drupal installation try the module http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate, for me worked in past.

Hi .. What was your reasoning for going Cloud Sites vs their Cloud Server flavour? .. ???

Interesting.

As our site has grown, we are going the OPPOSITE way. We are leaving the cloud in favor of a beefy, dedicated server and some code changes (esp. lots of in-memory caching).

Previously, we hosted with Mosso / RackSpaceCloud for about 18 months. The first 12 months went pretty smoothly, but as the site (and RackSpaceCloud) have grown over the past 2 months (due to their marketing push), they have become completely unreliable.

They must be pushing past the limits of their immature system.

Our site was down for more than 20 DAYS last month (!). Yes, do the math. This isn't 99.99% up-time. This isn't even 99% up-time. This was about 33% up-time. A complete FAILURE any way you look at it.

To be fair, they did offer a small compensation for the inconvenience and an apology, but it doesn't even come close to what we lost in revenue to their unreliable system.

I contacted support daily about it, but they had a very, very hard time getting and keeping the site up.

They finally fixed it about a week ago, and I thought it would be fine. However, it has been down 3 MORE times in the past week. The issues range from "connectivity" to security to failing "nodes" (whatever that means).

Yes, their support is 24/7, and usually pretty fast, but most of the time, the support people will just "placate" you with either "we're looking into it" or "we'll open a ticket". It is very frustrating with your site is DOWN HARD, and they want to open you a ticket and get back to you within a week (or not...).

I my opinion, wait until their technology matures and they get their serious downtime issues fixed. Their homegrown cloud software needs some more scalability testing.

I am moving to a dedicated server immediately (I signed the contract last week... the pain was just too much). For those left behind... good luck.

We use Cloud Site.

We work on a quite a few sustainability focused sites and energy is factor for hosting those sites.

Email me if you want to know more about this: Arnold[at]appnovation[dot]com

Arnold

Arnold

I am the founder of open4nergy , an open source project for Green IT.

Two questions if I may?

1) Which version are you using, Cloud Site or Cloud Server?

2) Also, did energy management play a part in your thinking? We are preparing a paper on how small business must/needs play a part in saving energy. One of the simplest ways to do this is to move from an in-house, or dedicated hosted server, to a cloud where the energy efficiencies of scale are part of the data center design.

For more on what we are doing see: http://open4energy.com

Some statistics would also be great if you have them, like concurrency, availability under load etc

They'll charge as long as the Cloud Server image exists. There's an option to Delete it when not in use, but even on idle/off, it is still being charged. The difference between a Cloud Server and EC2 is that the Cloud Server actually sits on reserved section of that machine, hence it's still costing Mosso - and you - that hardware resource.

That said, could probably build a bootstrapper that'll load/unload database images from Cloud Files.

We are trying/testing this at the moment with 80 websites on one Drupal install in the Mosso Cloud Sites platform. See my blog post at http://mavergames.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/mosso-cloud-sites-and-mutlipl...

Here's more details (this is from http://manage.mosso.com/forum/posts/list/2158.page, provided by Damian G @ Mosso):

I just wanted to update this post as there has been a lot of talk about this lately and a couple of external blogs discussing this. You can use multi-site for many of the common multi-site CMS depending on the way they need to have it done. This is done with aliasing or "Point to" in our system.

You will first need to create a new database under the features tab of the primary domain.

Next you will create the new site that will be an alias. In the plan selection screen you will choose "Points to" and then choose the site that has the base install of drupal or whichever cms you are using.

With Drupal you will create an additional folder in the /sites folder named www.domain.com or domain.com (depending on what you will be hosting/allowing the site as). In this folder you will copy the default
settings.php (named settings.php) and then go to the new domain. The install page should show at this point.

For testing or setting up the alias portion prior to pointing dns to our system you would need to modify your local hosts file to point to the IP of the primary domain. Here's our knowledge base article on
how to do this:
http://help.mosso.com/article.php?id=363

The couple of downfalls to this are that you must create each alias in the control panel as we do not support Wildcard DNS. Additionally we do not support Wildcard SSL certificates or the ability to install SSL certificates for aliases. So it will be dependent on your needs but it can be done on CloudSites Let me know if anyone has any questions and I'll be happy to sort it all out.

Hi there,

How do you do this?:

"Then you will point 245.com to a.123.com and b.123.com. You cannot just point all domains to the server root as you would." -- from your multisite update

In Mosso, in the domain records control, I can redirect www.seconddomain.com to seconddomain.firstdomain.com no problem. When I try it without the www -- seconddomain.com -- it says I need an IP address. Do I just put in the IP of the first domain?

Or do you do this via some other means?

Thanks!

and yes, i am talking about cloud sites... cloud servers are just VPS's so of course they have multisite ability.

multisites works fine on mosso cloud sites.

read my post again.

you create a new site for the second domain, but it is just an alias pointing to the first. its the bottom option when you are choosing a hosting package.

thanks
ryan.

Are you talking about Cloud Site or Cloud Server? Cloud Server DOES have multi-site support and everything.

If you are talking about Cloud Site:

how did you add another domain that points to the same Drupal installation directory?

Update: do you add a subdomain and point the new domain to the subdomain via DNS? We could not get 2 different domains to point the same directory and thats what we tried.

One thing to note is that the MySql database does not automatically scale on most cloud site services, including Mosso, so if the database becomes the bottleneck you still might need to use a Cloud Server for your db (I believe Mosso Sites db supports 3k connections, so it should be fine for most ppl). The other nice thing about the server is the ability to use APC and memcached.

Also, since they don't charge you for a server unless it's turned on, you could theoretically have a load balancer let you know if you need to turn on or off add'l resources, I'm not sure if there is a way to do that automatically yet, but I imagine it would be something a lot of ppl would like to see made available via their api.

whoops,

you need to actually try multisite before saying it does not work on mosso. it works fine. you just create a new site for the next domain, choose the alias option and point to your existing site. i have many multisites on mosso... what made you think multisite would not work?

please correct this in the article as it is clearly false.

the only thing mosso does not support in the way of multisite is wildcard subdomains.. you have to add new subdomains as alias sites or in the domain control panel.

also you can use svn or git over sshfs... just mount the sftp as a drive and treat it as a local filesystem. not great but better than no source control...

I believe there is a control panel which allows you to configure cron amongst other things.

Wow, that's a fantastic saving if performance is at a similar level.

It is certainly difficult living without shell access, so no scripted deployments or other automated functions.

What about cron? If they don't have shell access how you were able to setup cron that drupal needs?

Amazing as it sounds, the cost at this time even for a 200K visitors/month site is only in the $100 range. Before the hosting cost was a $XXXX number. The performance has been great thus far. The only thing I hate is the lack of SSH which means no SVN no DB admin via command line.

Actually the multi-site issue only applies to Mosso cloud sites, their cloud server product can support multi-site. The issue with cloud site is that you cannot point 2 domains to the same server directory, aka no virtual host. The benefit is that it scales automatically, as in you dont need to click upgrade to get more RAM, etc. I havent look into other cloud options.

I'd be interested to hear more details about performance versus cost. What is your performance like now you are on Cloud Hosting compared to before and what kind of hardware were you running before? How much more cost effective is your new solution compared to your previous?

Some statistics would also be great if you have them, like concurrency, availability under load etc.

Interesting to know about the multisite incompatibility. Is this happening only with Mosso or with any cloud system? (I'm quite ignorant on clouds other than on the ones in the sky....)

No idea yet, but if they do, it would be great and I will let everyone know.

Thanks for this, do you know if they are planning on adding multi domain support in the future?

The reason is that cloud server doesnt scale automatically as in you need to click a button to scale up your server. Cloud sites automatically scale for you.

What was your reasoning for going Cloud Sites vs their Cloud Server flavour?

I've been playing around with Mosso cloud servers since they released the product and have been nothing but impressed at their setup and support.