Mosso or EC2 for hosting websites

I have the domain figaf.com where I’m hosting a CMS joomla site with some tools I have created. There is not a lot of traffic on the site. There are currently only 200 visitors a day, so it does not require a large server. The application that I’m using requires command access to run. I could therefore not use a hosted PHP plan. I therefore had to somehow get a server or use Virtual Private Server. I liked the idea of being able to scale the business after the needs.

I original choose Amazon EC2 because it was the only place I could rent servers for a low monthly rate. I did not find slicehosts plans attractive in comparison. They seem too small for what I needed, because I did not have any idea of what I needed.

I have now decided to move to Mosso. Mosso is Rackspaces name for Slicehost, after Rackspaces acquired Slicehost.

The advantages of Mosso are:

  • Plans starts with just 256Mb ram while EC2 has 1.7Gb.
  • Backup for small servers is done with a click in the control panel.

The Amazon EC2 solution has the following advantages:

  • Datacenters in both US and Europe giving lower roundtrip times.
  • Large verity of images from different vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM
  • Auto scaling and load balancer application, so it is easy to customize the operation of the scalable web infrastructure.
  • No cost on data to the S3 service, where data and backups can be stored.
  • The ability to customize backup and additional storage capabilities with Elastic Block storage.
  • EC2 has a proven API, where Mosso is just releasing their version.

The Pricing of the 2Gb Mosso and the 1.7Gb EC2 is about the same. So it should not be the reason to choose any of the services.

I have not compared the CPU speed of the two solutions. Mosso says that it will allow the extra capacity to be shared among the instance running, so you might get more CPU cycles here.

I will continue to use EC2 for testing SAP software running on windows. Because the I’m not required to purchase hardware for the tests.