Design & Web

Well, that was a complete failure. As happened last time I followed the temptation to leave and cut costs, I find myself back at Liquid Web (again) with an even more expensive “hosting plan” (again). As the saying goes, “you get what you pay for.” So, I’ve moved off the 2.8GHz P4 with a gig-o-ram and single 80-gig drive that was fast approaching 3 years of age (the age at which you start to fear drive failure). In it’s place sits a dual-core 2.6GHz box with a whopping 4 gigs-o-ram and twin 160-gig drives in a hardware RAID1 (a “mirror” in English, so in 3 years I wont fear the failure again). Accommodating as ever, Liquid Web managed to swing the replacement in for no more than the cost of the RAID, and even threw in a third 160GB drive. They’ve also made some significant improvements in cPanel/WHM and available security options in the three years since I’ve looked at managed servers.

Mosso, which sells itself with a convincing pay-as-you-consume auto-bill-your-clients Windows-and-Linux-at-the-same-time cluster > server argument, looks quite professional on the outside and at a mere $100+growth monthly sounds quite the good deal. Inside it’s a completely different story, however. Everything about the place seems very jerry-rigged and downright amateurish. In fact, having given it a go for almost two months I find myself questioning their claim that they really have the official backing of RackSpace (as their about-us story says) or are even a RackSpace venture (as their footers say). I find it far more likely that it’s a couple of RackSpace employees (as they’ve claimed) that just wrangled a bunch of free or seriously discounted servers from the company so they can play host. There were little troubles here and there, and constant chats to support to have them do something their shoddy management interface errored-out doing (which grew tiresome), but it really came to a head when suddenly all of my sites, my clients’ sites, and for that matter all php sites went down for a day. I mean really, how in the hell does a serious host let a single failed power strip bring down the entire PHP section of the cluster for more than a day? THERE’S A REASON COMMERCIAL GRADE SERVERS HAVE AT LEAST TWO POWER SUPPLIES AND TWO POWER CABLES YOU IDIOTS!!! As if that wasn’t enough, the way they have their setup structured left all sites intermittent at best for the next several weeks. I could understand if this was a one time thing, but inquires answered by long-time Mosso customers assured me that I could expect much the same to happen every couple months. No, I very much doubt RackSpace has any more than a passive interest in Mosso, and even then only so much as they don’t set the building on fire.

The other good thing to come out of this, I suppose, is that the move from Liquid Web (cPanel) to Mosso (proprietary) forced me to get off my duff and rebuild the template for Chazz.US on the latest WordPress – something I’d been putting off since before Widgets. Of course, I no later get this (almost) done and they release RC1 of the heavily re-developed WordPress 2.5.