Update: Mosso is now known as The Rackspace Cloud. Maintaining the Mosso name here, but updated links.
Oh boy, where to begin…
A few weeks ago when Mosso launched their Cloud Server service, I was unimpressed. Nevertheless, this week I migrated from Slicehost to Mosso. As mentioned in the previous article about Mosso, they’re a cheaper option for me, as I don’t use all the bandwidth allocated in my Slicehost plan. I didn’t switch to save money, but to purchase a VPS twice as large than my Slicehost one, for roughly the same price.
Configuring a new server and transferring everything was an uneventful process, the source of all my grief in the migration was fighting with Mosso’s control panel and its numerous shortcomings. If it wasn’t for their helpful support team, I would have said, “screw it,” and stuck with Slicehost. I’m going to be lazy and simply list my present annoyances with Mosso:
- The control panel is still very slow, but doesn’t seem to error as often as when I first tried it out.
- Customers are unable to set the PTR for their server themselves, support must be contacted to do so. Amusingly, performing a reverse DNS lookup on a new server reveals the PTR defaults to Slicehost’s naming scheme (e.g. 12.34.56.78.static.slicehost.net).
- The same goes for TXT records. Email support to have them created. However I was informed the ability to manage them will be added “in the VERY near future.”
- While the ability to contact support via chat is nice, most the time I was directed to the wrong department despite selecting the appropriate type of issue. At least my question was forwarded with me to the cloud servers support, negating the need to repeat myself.
- The support forum, while integrated into the control panel, for some unspeakable reason requires a separate login. Once the forum account is created, one must then contact support to have it activated. Aren’t necessary hurdles fun?
- Support ticket response time is fairly long. With Slicehost, all of my tickets were resolved within an hour. So far with Mosso, both of my tickets have taken over 18 hours to be resolved. Of course, the tickets would never had needed to be sent if I could set my PTR and TXT records myself.
DNS records. Ugh. This one deserves a paragraph. DNS management is probably the slowest and buggiest part of the control panel. Customers cannot edit records, only create and delete… but if one tries to delete a record, they receive an error and the record remains. To edit or delete a record, one must delete the domain and all records associated with it. As long as no mistakes are made, this isn’t a major issue.
Unfortunately, I learned the hard way Mosso’s DNS manager automatically adds the trailing period to records. So after I had created about 30 records only to realize they weren’t recognized by the nameserver, I had to delete and recreate every single of them. I wouldn’t have minded doing so if it weren’t for the fact the control panel was so slow. I began to listen to this song at the time I started recreating the DNS records, and I finished shortly after it did. Yup, over 13 minutes for 30 records. Mind you, I was copying and pasting… the control panel was wholly responsible for ridiculous amount of time it took to create the records.
I’m happy to have switched hosts, though I’m hesitant to recommend one over the other. If you’re looking to purchase a VPS, check out Slicehost’s plans and Mosso’s calculator on their pricing page. If you find Mosso to be the cheaper option, and you consider yourself a patient person willing to tolerate the issues I outlined (and possibly, though hopefully not, more), then by all means choose Mosso. I’m confident they’ll fix their control panel before too long. If however the prices between Mosso and Slicehost are the same, I suggest Slicehost. They have faster support and a control panel which doesn’t consume the souls of those unfortunate enough to encounter it.
