Mosso, So Slow

I signed up for an account on Mosso, the cloud hosting provider who was purchased by RackSpace.  I figured for $100 a month, I could have as much computing power as I require, and expandability whenever I need it.  Plus, they have automated billing tools built right in, allowing me to act as a reseller.

All this sounded too good to be true, and it was.  During the first day, I attempted to upload a few projects I was working on to my web space.  I fired up Coda, connected to my Mosso server space via FTP and started to send up files.  Low and behold, every file sent had about a 1-2 second latency before transfer.  Now, I’ve seen this before, and to solve the problem you typically set your FTP client to use Active Transfers instead of Passive.  No dice.  Same slow speed.

Now, latency of 1 second per file doesn’t sound bad, but when you consider an upload of 500 files will take a minimum of 8 minutes and 20 seconds, you realize that it’s quite a nuisance, especially as a developer, when you might decide to duplicate your entire WordPress install to try some new, crazy code.  Imagine waiting 8 minutes to download your entire WordPress site, then another to upload it to a new directory.

So I moved on.  I started messing with a web site install (WordPress, of course) and I got the same effect on the front end, a 1-2 second delay before the response was sent to the browser.  I expected so much more from a server that is supposed to represent the future of computing.  Anyway, today I cancelled my Mosso account, and I’m moving on.

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4 Responses to “Mosso, So Slow”

  1. John  on August 14th, 2009

    Interesting posting. I’m using mosso myself, and I am experiencing the same issues. It’s very slow. Especially when using it internationally. Do you recommend any other companies with similar service I could switch to?

  2. admin  on August 14th, 2009

    I’ve recently switched to MediaTemple’s GS (GridService) and I love it. Haven’t had any trouble with them at all. Plus, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Mosso. In addition, the GS account lets you scale by ordering extra “Containers” So my setup is 1 GS container and 1 MySQL container for my databases. Works really well.

    Best of luck to you.

  3. admin  on August 14th, 2009

    Two additional comments…
    1. I’m running a Media Temple DV server for one of my clients. It’s great performance and not too expensive.
    2. For my own sites, I’m running a WiredTree Managed VPS server, and I highly recommend it. In fact, I would recommend WiredTree over MediaTemple for one reason alone: WiredTree customer support is amazing. I usually get a response to a support ticket within 1/2 hour on WT, and on two of my support tickets I got a reply back in less than 7 minutes. In comparison, on MT, support tickets typically take about 6-8 hours for a reply. Doesn’t sound like much, but when you have a customer calling you every 15 seconds, every minute counts.

  4. Reagan  on May 3rd, 2010

    Hey -

    I’m experiencing a similar issue with a 1-2 second delay before my clients websites load.

    I was hoping this was a new issue, but now I’m seeing you had the same problem back in 2009.

    Thanks for your post,

    Reagan Williams


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