I just moved The Hot Aisle onto the Mosso Hosting Cloud and away from the Virtualized, Red Hat Linux and MySQL environment it was born on. The Hot Aisle was getting a bit too big to be crowded into the corner of the single server we borrowed from Ewan MacLeod’s SMSTextNews blog (thanks Ewan) and so we had to move.

I have to tell you that I am very impressed by Mosso, by the approach and underlying technology.

The basic stuff is something Mosso (who are a subsidiary of Rackspace) called cloudFS, which they say was designed to be easy to use, highly available, very secure, fast, extremely scalable,  simple to maintain, and cost effective for the customer.  However that’s not it! That’s not the key to why it is so cool and so flexible.

Mosso’s cloudFS is cool because it is attached to an TrueHybrid a load balancing technology that checks the type of each file it tries to load, sending files to one of two sets of clusters where they execute. TrueHybrid means that you upload both ASP and PHP files to the same website and in the same folder, ASP invokes the Windows cluster and PHP the Linux one! Every Windows page is served from a Windows cluster, and every Linux based page is served from a Linux cluster.

So we could construct a single website that serves up ASP and PHP pages seamlessly, perhaps we could use a neat snippet of code that we found somewhere that just does not conform to the language of our website? Interesting concept, but I don’t think that is the core advantage. The core advantage is that we can host multiple Websites on the same $100 per month worth of rented capacity. We can have our Wordpress (PHP) blog, sitting beside an ASP driven shopping site in the same directory structure. We get both worlds in the same place for a single price.

That’s not all, The Hot Aisle is growing fast (reaching over 55,000 page impressions already) and with the Data Centre Solutions syndication tie up, I wanted to be sure that we didn’t run out of steam. The Hosting Cloud gives me completely flexible and scalable infrastructure regardless of how popular The Hot Aisle gets. Because there are thousands of servers in the cloud and each incoming request can be served by a different one, I can’t run out of capacity.

I think that Mosso understate on their Website is just how green The Hosting Cloud can be. Think about it, rather than having every server scaled to deal with maximum demand all of the time (at a huge wasted hardware and energy cost) Rackspace just have to deal with maximum aggregate demand, a very much smaller number. I would be very interested to see the target utilization figures for The Hosting Cloud, I bet that it isn’t 2% like the average Windows Server!

I love cool technology that is easy and focussed on solving a real problem. I think Mosso may well have got it right.