Last week’s incident with Amazon Web Services briefly going down may have raised questions about the reliability of cloud computing, but demand is high enough for competitors to keep trying to get into the game. The more companies that enter this space, the cheaper and more competitive that Web-scale computing should become.
Today, hosting provider Rackspace is offering a new cloud computing service through its subsidiary Mosso. (Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). The service competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), although it doesn’t require any load balancing or other administration. It also competes with Joyent and Media Temple’s Grid Service. Pricing starts at $100 a month for:
—50 GB of storage
—500 GB of bandwidth for transferring data
—3 million HTTP requests.
From there additional capacity per month costs:
—$0.50/GB of storage
—$0.25/GB of bandwidth
—$0.03/1,000 HTTP requests
This is a bit more expensive than Amazon (which charges in a different way) but a lot cheaper than the $350 to $400 a month Rackspace charges to host a dedicated server for a Website.
Mosso bills itself as a Web app hosting service. Applications are hosted on redundant server clusters (although the data center is only in one location, so something could take the whole thing out—like, say, if a truck were to run into a nearby power transformer). Coders choose what technology stack they want their apps to run on and upload their code. Mosso supports both Windows and Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Perl, Python, MySQL, and SQL Server. (Amazon, in contrast, does not support Windows). Mosso does not yet support Java applications, but it is working on that. The company actually has been testing the service for nearly two years and already runs 37,000 apps.
