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Mosso Launches CloudFS — Amazon S3 Competitor
Cloud hosting provider Mosso (part of Rackspace) is announcing the launch of CloudFS today in private beta. CloudFS is similar to Amazon’s S3 simple storage offering. Pricing will start at at $0.15 per gigabyte, upon release, including replicated copies for data protection. The CloudFS pricing appears to be a bit less expensive than the new Amazon S3 pricing.
One of their slides states, "No charges for incoming or outgoing bandwidth for Rackspace and Hosting Cloud customers." My guess is this means that file transfers won’t incur charges but bandwidth usage will still be charged. I have a confirmed call with Rackspace at 10am and will update this post accordingly.
CloudFS is available as both a standalone service or as part of Rackspace/Mosso hosting packages. If you want to apply for the private beta, complete the application here.
For this new file sharing service to compete with Amazon, they will need to "woo" developers over. A little bit of a cheaper price won’t be enough. Amazon recently changed their support model to offer paid premium support. With hosting being a commodity, support can be a major differentiator. While my review will come later this week (see below), so far the quality of support personnel that Rackspace/Mosso offers has been very high. I have been impressed with the knowledge, intelligence and easy-to-understand people they have on the support team.
CenterNetworks is currently using Mosso (for the past six weeks) and my review will be posted later this week. The twitter version is that the first two weeks were a complete disaster, since then it’s been solid. I’ve had good conversations with the Mosso founders over the six weeks and my review will cover everything. Grab the RSS feed to be instantly notified when the review is live.
You said you would update the post after your call, but you failed to do so. Perhaps next time you can circle back with follow-up data.
and I can’t say I would recommend them. They get a lot of things right (fast servers and support availability), but they also have a lot of service/support issues (much like their parent Rackspace). Just last week I had to deal with three techs and wait 2 weeks for a resolution when they accidentally set up two authoritative FTP servers for one of my domains. Their recent decision to turn hit count metering on for their existing customers lost them some users, and I for one have lost my trust in them. Mosso is a great idea, executed well enough, but with some oddities in management and execution that make it difficult to stand by.
I know a lot of customers are disappointed with the request pricing metric, especially those with mostly static content, but there are lots of options for hosting static content on the net. What we need is a fast, reliable compute cloud. There are few of those, especially for the .NET platform.
With this pricing model, they are shifting focus to high value request sites like enterprise applications and subscription based SaaS providers and away from static content sites like home pages that directly generate little revenue.
I’m looking forward to the CloudFS offering. S3 is good, but I’d rather have it all at Mosso and we will save money on bandwidth. I’ve written more about in my blog post: Mosso CloudFS
We tried Mosso out for a while about a year and a half ago, we were not impressed – frequents outages and performance issues. Also, MySQL DB connectivity often dropped. They responded relatively quickly but outages were too frequent to justify staying with them.