Friday, March 20th, 2009

I’m a big fan of Slicehost and I’ve heard nothing but good things about Rackspace, so when it was announced last October that Rackspace had acquired Slicehost I began eagerly looking forward to the new services this team could offer.

This week the first of these was announced: Mosso Cloud Servers.

About Mosso Cloud Servers

Mosso is a Rackspace-owned company who specializes in “cloud” hosting services. Cloud Files is a static file Content Delivery Network (CDN), similar to Amazon’s S3 service, and Cloud Sites is an interesting take on managed hosting. Cloud Servers is the latest addition to the family.

At first glance, Cloud Servers looks like pretty much just another VPS service. But the interesting thing is that they’re priced on a utility model, starting at $0.015/hour with bandwidth added on at $0.08/GB incoming and $0.22/GB outgoing, all billed at the end of the month. So you pay as you go, and only pay for what you use.

Running the numbers gives us a base rate of $10.95/month for the server plus bandwidth. A low-traffic server using, say, 10 GB outgoing bandwidth per month, will cost a little over $13/month. Not a bad deal. You’ll have to use around 40 GB per month before you approach the $20/month range which is the standard price for a low-end VPS.

Built on Slicehost

Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that this service is built entirely on the Slicehost platform. The service levels are the same, the Linux distributions offered are the same, the web-based control panel looks very similar (except that it appears to have been rewritten in Java for the Mosso services), and most tellingly, the IP address I was assigned when I ordered one resolved back to the .slicehost.net domain. I even found the word “slice” in one or two places around the control panel.

What does this mean for Slicehost?

Probably not much, really. Slicehost and Mosso are sister companies in the Rackspace family, and you’re ultimately doing business with Rackspace no matter which one you choose. While it’s possible that a decreased interest in Slicehost’s offerings may not bode well for the future of the company, that’s something that’s quite a ways down the road. I think the target markets for these two competing services are different enough that it won’t be a problem.

Which one do I choose?

As an end-user wanting to use Slicehost’s service, you now have more choice. You’re getting the same thing either way, so the two remaining questions are a) whether you’d like to use other Mosso Cloud services such as the CDN, and b) how much traffic your server will get.

The new Mosso control panel controls all the Cloud family offerings, so this might be a good way to go if you expect to use Cloud Files as well. On the other hand, if you expect to run a high-traffic server you just might want to stick with Slicehost for the higher bundled bandwidth.

Whichever you choose, you’ll be getting the same great service you’ve come to expect from both Slicehost and Rackspace, so you really can’t lose.

Update (July 8, 2009): The Mosso family of services has now been rebranded as The Rackspace Cloud.