After being a customer for the Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso) for quite some time, I’m happy to say that my business and anyone who listens to our advice will never be using this hosting service, ever again.
Rackspace is an amazing company. They are know for having great servers, great support, great everything. You can’t beat them. Mosso was a side project that was swallowed up by them which aims to run websites in a real, actual cloud. This is a valiant cause. To be able to upload a site to one server and have it scale infinitely over however many servers their datacenter has without ever having to touch it…that’s a miracle. It’s a great idea, that unfortunately just doesn’t work.
Mosso has repeatedly let us down, again and again. Their service is always going down. It’s hard to find a month where one of our sites hosted on the “cloud” hasn’t seen at least an hour of down time. I’d expect this from a shoddy “HOST 100 SITES FOR $2.99/mo!!” host, but not from someone charging a base rate of $100/mo. Here’s what it boils down to: you’re paying Mosso a lot of money for the privilege of beta testing their cloud architecture. Great business model.
And while Rackspace is known for fanatical support, the Rackspace Cloud is known by us for support that is fanatical about ignoring or avoiding the issues plaguing them on a week-to-week basis. Questions go unanswered, support requests ignored, etc etc.
So all in all, it’s been a terrible experience. And yes, we have been using them for more than a month…a little over a year now. Yes, we stuck it out and payed outlandish hosting rates for horrible service. Why? Because I really do wish it worked. I wish I could put a site on it and have it be up 100% of the time. That’s the point of a cloud, no? To have >= 99.999% uptime? I really wish I could put a site on there and let it scale with demand as it grew without ever having to touch it – and I can do this – but the price is my site goes down for long periods of time at short intervals (oh, plus the $100/mo). We tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, and tried to believe them every time they told us that this was the last downtime they’d be having (yes, we heard it a lot). I just can’t lie to myself any more though. Mosso sucks.
So please save yourself some time and realize that it’s too good to be true. The Rackspace Cloud is the most real and cool cloud hosting you’ll ever see, but as far as I’m concerned they are still alpha-testing it, and your site WILL go down. Want hosting that scales automatically, is zero customer maintenance, always up, and has amazing support? You won’t find it anywhere.
Mosso comes close, but they just can’t get it right. Save your money and learn how to scale on a good VPS provider.
Hi Andrew,
Thank you for taking the time to write out your concerns. First, let me just sincerely apologize for the poor experience you’ve received from the Rackspace Cloud. This is certainly not the Rackspace way. I understand your concerns with uptime and with support (or lack thereof) and there are specific initiatives we’re putting in place to address both. Chris Tannery, our Support Manager, will be in contact with you to discuss further.
Again, thanks for your candid feedback and feel free to contact me directly with further questions or concerns. Your feedback is essential to improving the Rackspace Cloud customer experience.
Angela Bartels
@rackcloud
Andrew, I could have written this myself. So true.
For what it’s worth, I would advise at this point against
giving them a second (more like third or forth, I think)
chance at this point unless you can rapidly switch away
to a backup solution in case that goes awry.
Because this is what their “specific initiatives” seem to
mean.
First, you get frantic calls from them about how you’re
bringing down the system. Then, you point out to them where,
perhaps, a bottleneck could be, offering to help with debugging.
Not to much avail; you’re being shut off because you’re the
problem. Then, after you’ve spent a sleepless frantic night
trying to migrate things to one of the real cloud providers
(http://aws.amazon.com/, say), and are close to done, they call
you with apologies, as they experienced a device failure.
Emil Sayegh himself offers profuse apologies and solemn
promises to regain your trust. You are furious, but think
that crap happens to everyone. And you continue on with Rackspace
Cloud.
Until a few weeks later they shut you off, refuse to accommodate
you and never offer an explanation. Emil is nowhere to be seen.
You never get past level 1 or 2 of their support who’ve obviously
been instructed to obstruct you. It appears that they have no idea
what the problem is, but cannot admit it. The problem continues
for a while even though they’ve shut you off.
You thank your favorite deity that you are pretty much done with
the migration due to prior failure, and bid them goodbye.
And you remember now that what Emil Sayegh’s word is worth.
Sorry, Angela.
Wow, Ado, your story makes me feel like a 15 year old girl who dresses as a stripper on halloween and complains about how cold she is.
We had a client’s production site on “the cloud” but the site was new and downtime was somewhat acceptable. Our client, as pissed off as we were about the shoddy hosting, moved to EC2 (as you suggested).
I never lost a whole lot of sleep over it because our main site, http://beeets.com, is hosted on Linode. We had seriously considered putting beeets on Mosso but decided not to because it was fine on Linode and switching would just cause more pain than the $20/mo for the VPS. I’m glad we never went through with it.
I will say one good thing about Mosso: they make reselling slices of your hosting really easy…but I’d have to say I really only reccommend it for smaller sites that can lose a few hours a month.
Angela, thanks for the comment. There isn’t a whole lot to discuss though, as we’ve been given many empty promises before, and are fed up with the service.
> Wow, Ado, your story makes me feel like a
> 15 year old girl who dresses as a stripper
> on halloween and complains about how cold she is.
LOL
> Our client, as pissed off as we were about the shoddy
> hosting, moved to EC2 (as you suggested).
Nobody is saying that EC2 will never fail, of course.
We are in uncharted waters, which is fascinating
to some degree (when the degree falls below 65 F,
though, the waters are not fascinating anymore).
> I will say one good thing about Mosso: they make
> reselling slices of your hosting really easy…
http://aws.amazon.com/devpay/
Yeah from what I know, EC2 has had its ups and downs (mainly ups though), but because they have several datacenters it’s a bit easier to spread yourself out more to prevent failures (more expensive though).
I’ve never even heard of the DevPay feature, thanks for pointing that out. Definitely worth looking into. One thing worth mentioning is that Mosso will provide support to your resold customers, so once you sign them up you can give them a number to call and never have to deal with their hosting again. If you’re big into reselling, that could be a deal-breaker, but if you have an app you want to host for your own purposes, not really a bargaining chip.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by andrew, RS Cloud User. RS Cloud User said: @rackcloud #rackcloud http://blog.killtheradio.net/reviews/mosso-the-rackspace-cloud/ another one bites the dust [...]
Thanks for the info. I work for a large Pharma company and we are venturing into the cloud space just to make it easier to ramp up applications – especially where we have to work with outside companies. The cloud makes it easier for us to deploy and have outside partners connect – it is almost impossible to do this stuff in-house because of internal security issues, …
We are starting to look at all the cloud hosting vendors so this is good information.
CMT, I’d stay away from Rackspace Cloud. If you want managed dedicated servers, Rackspace has no equivalent.
So far the best “cloud” service I’ve seen is Amazon. There is a great comparison of VPS/cloud services here:
http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
Keep in mind, Rackspace and Amazon are the only ones that support hourly billing.
You know, I feel the same way regarding Mosso’s service. I was really excited to use them, but then they just didn’t pan out to be the way it was all written to be. It was difficult for me to get up and running and the technical support didn’t help much (so much for fanatical support). I started looking for other cloud providers, I ended up going with SiteCloud. Up and running very easily. I’ll report back if they screw me over too! For now, everything appears to be good, blog is running super fast!
Sandra, I’m not surprised. I’d like to hear about your experiences with SiteCloud after you’re with them for a while. I’m interested if their service is good. From the looks of it they’re abstracting out EC2 hosting fairly cheaply…which is nice. Anyway, good luck, thanks for the comment, and let me know how it goes!