Marco Tabini has a great post discussing the cost of the cloud, and the current state of affairs. He calls for a simpler cloud platform, not just in terms of cost, but ease of use and products and services that adapt to changes in the market. Though the $100/month Mosso offering is mentioned (this site is hosted on Mosso), I would like to point out the recent acquisitions by Rackspace/Mosso that make their cloud offerings even more compelling than AWS for me.
- Slicehost : Rackspace announced the acquisition in late 2008. This allows me to spin up virtual instances or Slicehost’s version of AMI’s called Slices (this was updated due to Ian’s comment below. You cannot migrate an AMI from EC2 to Slicehost). fairly quickly, and cheaply, but more importantly I know what definitively what my costs will be if I know how much bandwidth I’ll be using up.
- JungleDisk: I think is a good way to get into the consumer space, I’ve told a lot of my friends to use JungleDisk to back up their files, with the obvious caveat to encrypt sensitive information and not to back up your SSN # to the cloud
- Limelight CDN: I think this is just the static file portion, not the video stuff yet, but it’s pretty neat.
Now acquisitions alone don’t make something worthwhile, it’s what you do with them. I’m not a 100% clear on what the plans are with JungleDisk, but I have seen what they’re doing with Slicehost and Limelight and it’s pretty slick.
If you’re a Mosso customer, you can now enable Cloudfiles and Cloud Servers.
Cloudfiles has in my opinion a much better set of documentation of it’s API, and a much lower barrier to entry. I was literally able to upload content to the system in less than 5 minutes of signing up. You can already use Cyberduck and access the cloud files system via a simple to use FTP client. There’s also a firefox extension. This incidentally highlights the power of open source. I believe the Mosso guys did the development themselves for Cyberduck and contributed the code back, I could be wrong. This is a great equalizer for a player late in the game. S3 is now available as an option on almost every major closed source file transfer application, but getting a company to invest time in your system is hard to do. There has to be a demand, which may not come because there’s no easy way to access your system. So they solved the ease of use problem right off the bat.
Apart from ease of access/adoption, what I really like, is that the incoming bandwidth to cloudfiles is free, if you’re using Mosso. So, if my web front end accepts a file upload, I can take that and upload it to cloudfiles without incurring bandwidth costs. So, now I have a load balanced web server and a fairly low cost CDN available to me under one control panel.
Then, add Cloudservers. Which is basically slicehost, without the bandwidth priced in. And the same rules apply here, any bandwidth to and from Mosso and Cloudservers is complimentary. So now, I can spin up my slices of MySQL, and use my flavor of Linux and my custom MySQL patches, and create my own cluster, or master/slave environment without the need to share resources with the other MySQL users in the cloud. This really gives me the flexibility that other shared hosting providers lack.
Lastly, something you can’t put a price on. Customer Support. Rackspace is truly fanatical about support, they really do give a crap, which is refreshing. What’s awesome is that the same quality of support is available for the Cloud offerings as is for their Managed Hosting customers. I can’t afford managed hosting, and I always thought that sure if I’m paying $500/month for an ok system the support better be good, but for $100/month , virtually unlimited websites and clients, and I get the same level of professional/non script reading support? Why should I waste time trying anything else? I have no idea who or what to call or email to when it comes to AWS.
Disclaimer: I think my last paragraph sounds like a marketing gimmick, so.. I’ve edited it a few times, but seriously, in this economy, and even in better economies, customer service is key, and these guys should run a customer service university for other tech companies.
Thanks to a comment by John Frank of Amazon in the comments below. There is indeed a way to get 24/7 support. AWS has had 24/7 phone and email support for quite some time: http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/#overview
I’d like to know who else you think is a major player for the consumer/bootstrap businesses out there as well as enterprises. I’ll be following this post up with a set of tools I use, to make my life in the cloud easier. I’d like to know what you use as well, applications, code libraries, etc.
If you’re considering using Mosso, I suggest you read Snipe’s Notes they are extremely well written and informative, and a coupon for two months free 
.
