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So long Mosso, hello MediaLayer

I tried so hard to love them… I really did. But this weekend I moved my hosting off Mosso and onto MediaLayer. My summary of Mosso: USD$100/month is way too much to be paying to feel like a “beta-tester”. But one day, when they get their act sorted out, they should be awesome. Here’s hoping.

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This entry was written by Alister Cameron and posted on 8 July 2007 at 9:29 pm and tagged: Asides, Gadgets/Tools, hosting, medialayer, mosso. // Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. // Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

15 Comments

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Joe

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago // Permalink

Hi Alister,

I agree the grids and the clusters are not quite ready for primetime just yet. How did you come across Medialayer? I’m looking forward to some of your thoughts on the new host!
Alister Cameron

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago // Permalink

Joe, I came across MediaLayer after an extensive “analysis” of the options on Web Hosting Talk (www.webhostingtalk.com), which is by far the biggest and best discussion forum for all things hosting-related. MediaLayer hasn’t been around forever, but they got consistently good feedback/commentary, and their price was ok for me.

They’re also located in LA. I wanted my site hosted on the west coast of the US, as few hops away from me as possible (in Melbourne, AU), but still hosted in the States for my international readership, in a leading datacenter, etc.

I pay the top rate at MediaLayer and have a number of other family/client sites migrating over there as well.
Aaron Spence

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago // Permalink

G’day Alister,

Did you find the actual download speeds etc from Mosso good? Were you hosting this blog there or other client work?

I’d be interested in a little bit of info on the problems you were having as I’ve been looking at Mosso for a while as a potential host for large amounts of data, but not to much in the way of applications.

Thanks, Aaron.
Alister Cameron

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago // Permalink

Aaron, the issues I and others had with Mosso were largely nothing to do with the “features”, meaning that the speed was great, the platform was excellent and did what it was supposed to do, etc. Lots of bandwidth and storage, etc.

Some have/had issues with the control panel and it’s lack of maturity… but that will evolve. Things that were annoying to some there was a lack of a cron “manager” (like in Plesk, say), email autoresponders, etc. These are the refinements that an old and mature hosting control panel has, which the home-made Mosso one presently lacks.

But the killer issue for Mosso was and remains the stability. It’s all in the stability. My site was down far too often. An hour here, an hour there, and — what killed me — nearly four days, when they mysteriously decided it was my site killing a MySql cluster, and sin-binned it. They then reloaded my database on a new MySql cluster, thus restoring my site, but took a month (no joke) to hook up phpMyAdmin access for that new cluster, despite my repeated beggings for it.

Finally a client of mine’s site has (still has, coz I’m yet to move him off Mosso) a weird 512 HTTP error given out to all majoy search engine spiders, meaning that he’s lost his Pagerank 5 and Google has now deindexed him. I have left his site there so Mosso can diagnose the issue (figuring that since we did nothing it must be in their Apache setup somehow), but nothing. Again, despite many attempts including emails to the founders. His site is next to leave Mosso.

Hope that fills it out a little. Mosso is great if downtimes here and there don’t matter. That said, they have a new CTO and his ONLY mandate, by his own confession, is stability and reliability. If he’s true to that then I would again recommend Mosso, if you can justify the USD$100/mo, which was a lot for me.

Cheers,

-Alister
Aaron Spence

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago // Permalink

Ouch, those are some nasty problems, no site for 4 days, no phpMyAdmin for a month & google delistings apart from the ‘minor’ issues.

Perhaps I’ll steer clear for while

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

Aaron.
Joe

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago // Permalink

Yes, thanks for the rundown! For $100/mo, I would expect better. It sounds like they’ve got a great system “In Theory”, but it’s not quite ready yet.

Although down for 4 days, and things not fixed for a month are extreme, I have heard similar sentiments about media temple (the other “grid” provider).

I just want a reasonably priced reliable host that almost never goes down, and when it does, it’s back up quickly. Is that too much to ask?
JJnorth

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago // Permalink

We to have tried Mosso for the past few months and I must say, problems abound. Mostly FTP errors and control panel issues, nothing too major, but we have had a completely different experience with the customer service. The guys at Mosso are incredible with answering phones, returning “problem” calls and curing problems (almost immediate). Perhaps our changes are minor in comparison, and thus easily and quickly fixed, but I can’t imagine better customer service and tech support than we’ve received over the past month.

Does the the great CS outway the fact that we’ve had to call so much…maybe not in the long run (if this keeps up), but it sure makes Mosso hard to be angry at.

…and they offered great incentives to stay with them, refund of that past month and 1 free month for one last go around…we really want to stay with them. Such a great solution for us…we’ll see…

JJNORTH
Alister Cameron

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago // Permalink

@JJnorth - I had exactly the same experience as you. The CS people are lovely and always there. Except nothing happened! They would “escalate” issues into a big black hole! I’d then have to check back and go thru the whole silly excercise all over again - “Please wait as I familiarise myself with this issue” …followed by… “I will make sure one of our admins has a look at your issue as soon as possible.” Then nothing. Then that all over again. And again.

It got to the stage where I had in mind to copy all the live help transcripts and post them up as some sort of a joke! So sorry. I don’t want nice CS people standing in front of a useless team of tech support “admins”. I don’t want to be made to feel good. I want to be taken care of… properly.

-Alister
doris cheng

Posted 1 year, 3 months ago // Permalink

How much downtime have you experienced with Medialayer so far? Any MySQL problems?
Alister Cameron

Posted 1 year, 3 months ago // Permalink

Hiya Doris.

Only a very short outage while they sorted out a router issue. It was less than 30 mins, I think. Compared to what had happened with Mosso, it’s nothing. And I know what it can be like to deal with routers and “infrastructure” so I’m ok with it. It’s a rare thing, and just happened to occur shortly after I signed up. Otherwise 100%. And no MySql issues at all.
doris cheng

Posted 1 year, 3 months ago // Permalink

Thanks for the feedback. I already canceled my 1-day old account with MT and signed up with MediaLayer. Thanks for the recommendation. We are happy with the speed and support.
Danny

Posted 1 year, 2 months ago // Permalink

When I was with Mosso they had all kinds of problems. Even their email didn’t t work. For the site to be down for an hour every now and again… well… ok. For email to be down and emails to be lost in the downtime?
Mosso Reseller

Posted 8 months ago // Permalink

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.
Trevor

Posted 3 months ago // Permalink

While it would be great to consider your suggestion of Medialayer, and I do need some job scheduling features. Medialayer appears to be only php / mysql, I would like to code on an IIS platform. The nightmares you had I don’t want. I would like a “mature” platform to run on. In your research did you come across any other contenders that also offer .NET and microsoft sql?
Alister Cameron

Posted 3 months ago // Permalink

Hi Trevor.

The short answer is no… because this was not the feature I was looking for. What I wanted was the stability and performance in PHP/MySQL.

I actually still have a few remaining sites on Mosso… and I can tell you they’re still having problem and still having people complaining a lot.

I am sure they’re around, but I can’t help you there, sorry. That said, scheduling in UNIX is no more complicated that CRON and/or SSH to set it up… have you decided that’s not enough?!

-Alister