I’ve long been looking around for some sort of internet connected home host for purposes such as experimenting with web application technologies and backing up source code.  After much consideration I finally decided on Mosso – which promised affordable fully featured virtual machines in their cloud.

I’ve never looked back since. The spin-up of the machine was a breeze, the installation of my preferred Linux distribution quick and for only about $10/month I had root access to my very own private Ubuntu server, with its own IP-address. Motto provides a handy management console for such tasks as taking backups of the instance, fiddling with the DNS configuration and migrating between their different plans. Initially I went for the dirt cheap basic plan which goes with 256 of RAM, 10GB of HDD and a guaranteed 1/64 part of the CPU power of  a 2-way quad core server. Memory demands stemming from Spotifun – a Grails based web application I’ve currently deployed to the instance – forced me to go one step higher on the plan ladder: 512 of RAM, 20GB of HDD and a 1/32 part CPU guarantee for ~$20/month. The migration was trivial, my virtual hard drive was simply grown and after a OS restart I was set.

Comparative evaluation

Competitor such as Amazon EC2 offer more assuring CPU-sharing guarantees but appear much more expensive than Mosso, an important consideration for my mostly hobbyist endeavors.  Mosso’s paltry CPU guarantees have in practice never troubled me, CPU-bounded work-loads typically flies. However I cannot judge out the possibility that I was simply lucky and got deployed to a lightly loaded physical server, the backdrop to this posting is only my personal experience with a single instance.

The only negative thing I want to add is that Mosso hosts its servers in the USA, causing an unavoidable round trip time of up to 200 ms for Europeans such as yours truly. The lag when hacking in a SSH console is acceptable for me, I’m not a fast typist anyway. 🙂 I’m not aware of any other cloud hosting service which currently allows the customer to decide the continent where the instance is to be hosted. However, the rumour mill has it that Microsoft Azure will have this feature when they are out of beta.

Mosso is since a couple of months back the Rackspace cloud.