I think many of you guys know that I run an educational site for BCOM students and the site is busiest ever in the month of June i.e. during the results. The traffic reaches around 60,000 visitors per day. During this period, hosting on shared server becomes impossible and last year even dedicated server failed to serve the high traffic. (Dual Xeon 2.8 and 2 GIG RAM)

So, I was looking for some solid hosting solution which can keep my site online during the high traffic period. I was first impressed with the Grid Server technology of MediaTemple, tried them for couple  of months but they were miserable, in the terms of uptime, customer support, technical support.. in short in everything. Then I heard about Mosso from WHT forums. The technology they offered looked impressive and even reviews on WHT were pretty good.

I decided to give it a shot, they charge 100 USD per month which is quite cheap compared to what I had paid for dedicated server last year (around 300 USD). The coolest thing they have is, they allow you to choose operating system, Windows or Linux. I did not use this feature but it will be useful for the guys who have PHP as well as ASP / .NET based sites.

Ok, now I moved the stuff with the help of support guys (No, they do not have shell access so I had to ask them to untar the files and all) The things started running smoothly.. the real test started on 15th of June, when I had a spike in the traffic, got around 35K visits on that day, Impressive!!! not even a single minute of downtime. The site was running smoothly with more than 200 people online at the same time. This left smile on my face but hold on, the show is not over yet.

Then comes the result day, 20th June. 68,000 visitors and still standing rock solid, no downtimes, no slow load times.. site running as smooth as it was running with 1000 visitors in a day.

This is what impressed me most. Rock solid. But the sad part is, I won’t be able to with them for next few months as the traffic is normal now and my site will run just fine on shared server. I informed them about it and they even tried to help me out by offering 2 months of free hosting but still it will be costly for me but I am definitely gonna signup again during results time. No point in choosing any other host.

So let me just sum the whole ting up..

Pros:

  • Pretty reasonable monthly charge, just 100 USD a month (80 GB Space / 2000 GB Bandwidth)
  • Superb uptime, rock solid stability
  • Top class Support, always available on Live chat, very helpful and with “very good” technical knowledge, I mean it, tried and tested 😀
  • Support for Linux and Windows
  • Option to manage your clients, create various hosting packages etc..
  • Backed by Rackspace

Cons:

  • No shell (SSH) support for Linux
  • No cron job support
  • Need to create a new package every time to add a sub domain
  • Not enough shortcuts in admin panel to access things quickly

Over all, I would rate it 4/5. It will be a really good option if your site is high traffic site and you do not need shell access or cron jobs. I would definitely go back to them again and will also recommend people.

Visit the site: Mosso.com

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