Mosso Inc. wants to bring affordable utility computing to the masses - or at least to web designers and developers. The start-up, which is backed by Rackspace Managed Hosting, has just launched an innovative reseller hosting service that offers unlimited websites, databases and e-mail accounts in a turnkey service for just $100 a month.
Mosso uses a "hosting system" of clusters of specialized servers, an approach typically seen in enterprise hosting, which can offer advantages in redundancy and performance. The company was built from the ground-up as an alternative to discount dedicated servers, which have been enormously popular with hosting resellers and power users.
Mosso's $100 a month reseller account comes with 80 gigabytes of storage space and 2,000 gigs of monthly data transfer. Customer support and billing are available as paid add-ons, allowing customers to outsource both services for just $5 per domain per month. Traffic load balancing and mitigation of denial of service attacks are included in each account, along with the ability to combine Windows and open source technologies on a web site, running ASP and PHP pages from the same web directory. There are significant differences with dedicated server solutions as well, as Mosso offers FTP uploads but not shell or root access.
Mosso's target audience isn't hard-core resellers, but rather web design and development firms that resell hosting services to their customers. "A lot of these companies are hosted on discount dedicated servers," said Mosso co-founder Todd Morey, a designer by trade who started the company with developer Jonathan Bryce. "It's still a huge technical burden, and a lot of the designers and development firms don't really have that expertise out of the box. Managing a server is a really big responsibility, and it's 24/7. These designers and developers just want something to complement their existing business."
Mosso may be new, but it 's not an entirely unknown quantity. The company is backed and hosted by Rackspace, one of the leading players in the managed hosting industry. Morey and Bryce developed the Mosso system while working at Rackspace, and have now struck out on their own - with their former employer's blessing and financial backing.
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