Thanks for the heads up on issues like SSL that I’ll run into soon enough. Same with mailbox size limits, etc.

I use server monitoring services on my sites, so I get an alert via email or text if something’s wrong. One of my sites monitoring is here:
http://tinyurl.com/pacstatus

More options like that here:
http://www.snipe.net/2009/01/cheap-or-free-website-status-monitoring/

I haven’t had many issues with failure or downtime at all, but I agree that they could be doing a better job of providing tools to customers to help them make sure all’s well. I spoke to a few of the RS guys at the NYC Tweetup this month about that kind of thing. For customers of non-cloud, dedicatd Rackspace servers, you’ll get an email is there’s been, for example, a high cpu load that could cause apache failure, but Mosso customers don’t get much in the way of tools.

One thing I suggested was to have some of the types of tools that Cpanel proides. I can’t stand cpanel – most insecure, piece of garbage control panel in the world – but even cpanel will email you if a script has been uploaded to your server that sends email, helping you make sure your account isn’t being used to send spam through malicious scripts, etc.

The guys said the idea had merit, but I don’t know how seriously they’re taking it. Maybe one of the Mosso/Rackspace Cloud guys can give you a better answer on any planned tools for stuff like that.

I was wondering what the Mosso failure modes have been for your sites? How did they fail? How did you know? And what were you able to do about the problems? It seems Mosso doesn’t provide much in this area.

thanks

But don’t forget — in Mosso world, once you have any page SSL, you have the whole thing SSL, so it treats the 10k visitors as checking out, which obviously exceeds their infrastructure.

Thanks again for replying. 10k visitors – that’s 10k concurrent, as in 10k people trying to checkout all at the same time?

I want to clarify, standard traffic is scalable and does work well (albeit relatively slow response times). It’s when there are purchases and SSL traffic that it gets ugly. As far as size is concerned, we “killed the SSL cluster” with just 10k visitors. That is not big by any stretch, but affected their other clients. I imagine non-SSL traffic (such as the blogs) can handle much more.

Rob La Gesse
Director of Customer Development
The Rackspace Cloud
210-845-4440

Last blog post: Why an Alpha Geek Web App Developer Moved to Cloud Sites: An Interview with Alison Gianotto

Thanks for your feedback. How long ago were you running into issues with Mosso? I’m not sure what you consider a small site, but scobelizer.com and techcrunch run on Mosso, and they don’t fall under the category of what I would consider small, or even medium-size sites.

I do know that there were issues as recently as a year ago, and more issues prior to that. Many of the developers who would previously not have recommended Mosso because of some significant growing pains are now with Mosso.