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.