On behalf of all of Mosso, welcome to the team, Bruce! For more detail about the announcement, check out this Forbes article.

Check out the article here: http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2439150.html

As you can see from our new screenshots, one of the highlights of this release is our all-new web-based file manager. Using the file manager, users now have a web-based view of their storage environment. Now you can easily execute advanced operations that would normally require shell access—such as creating and decompressing archives, or changing permissions—directly through the Mosso control panel.

It gets better: the file manager feature introduces a snapshot tool that now allows you to go back in time to access and reinstate previous versions of your files. This new tool takes a “picture” of the system every few hours, and keeps file versions on a rolling basis through midnight CST four days prior. This feature would especially be useful for an accidental overwrite, for example.

Behind the scenes, Mosso’s new, more flexible provisioning system has been designed to increase performance, speed and functionality. Built using Apache ServiceMix, the platform provides a robust, scalable integration point for both existing and new services.

This is the press release announcing the news:

Mosso Unveils Cloud Storage Service

Rackspace Division Ramps Cloud Momentum with Scalable API-Accessible Storage

SAN ANTONIO – May 5, 2008 – Rackspace® Hosting’s Mosso®, the company’s cloud hosting division, today announced plans to launch a new Internet-based storage offering, CloudFS™, that will let developers store any amount of data on the Web more easily and reliably than ever before.  CloudFS joins Mosso’s flagship service, The Hosting Cloud™, and complements Rackspace’s comprehensive suite of hosting products including its Mailtrust™ Email Hosting solution and the company’s traditional managed hosting services. CloudFS will be available to a limited number of customers in a free private beta for testing and refinement until Q3 2008, when it will open for public beta.

This file storage offering, CloudFS, allows developers to securely store a virtually unlimited amount of data on the web connected through Rackspace’s infrastructure. At the conclusion of the beta program, the new storage offering will be available as a stand-alone service or as part of Mosso’s The Hosting Cloud™ solution at competitive storage, bandwidth and transaction pricing.  In addition, Rackspace customers will benefit from free local transfers between CloudFS and their managed hosting servers.  The ability to tie a scalable and low-cost storage engine to Rackspace’s customized managed hosting environment is unique in the hosting industry.

“Rackspace is focused on developing the most comprehensive array of hosting capabilities available today. With the changing landscape of the industry, there’s no longer just one way to do it,” said John Engates, CTO, Rackspace Hosting. “Customers’ needs are expanding, and one of our key initiatives right now is making web-scale computing as value-added and as easy as possible. We believe that linking storage—an essential element of most Internet applications—and fast access to stored data, to a powerful standards-based infrastructure will become a critical business advantage for our customers.”

Mosso is seeking applicants to participate in a private beta program as well as encouraging developers to build tools and services around CloudFS. Developers and businesses interested in the private beta can visit www.mosso.com/cloudfs to apply starting May 5, 2008.

Pricing for CloudFS is strictly pay-for-what-you-use. Current plans target the pricing for storage to start at $0.15 per gigabyte, upon release, including replicated copies for data protection. This competitive rate allows developers to scale their storage-related projects seamlessly and affordably.

“We believe that Mosso is one of the most flexible hosting platforms available today,” said Jonathan Bryce, Mosso co-founder. “In February, we launched The Hosting Cloud platform and have seen strong demand. CloudFS is the next step in our overall mission to provide the industry’s most flexible and broadest range of hosting options—from traditional complex managed hosting to cloud compute solutions.”

The storage platform will be accessed via a ReSTful web services API and language-specific API’s (.NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, Python), giving customers confidence that they can quickly and easily store data and run applications in a business-class, standards-based environment.
CloudFS builds on Mosso’s recently launched service, The Hosting Cloud, created to give developers access to the benefits of cloud computing without the technical complexities and trade-offs associated with existing solutions. By utilizing The Hosting Cloud, developers do not need to worry about underlying technology such as servers, virtual private servers or operating systems.
CloudFS was developed in collaboration with Rackspace’s R&D division, RackLabs.  To learn more about CloudFS, visit their blog: http://blog.racklabs.com.

About Mosso
Mosso, LLC is the home of The Hosting Cloud and CloudFS, providing enterprise-grade hosting and storage services. Mosso provides an easily managed interface so that developers, designers and IT managers can deploy reliable web applications quickly and easily as well as a high performance cloud-based storage service.  Founded by two Rackspace employees, The Hosting Cloud is built upon a cross platform, clustered-computing architecture. For more information, visit www.mosso.com or call 1.877.934.0409.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting delivers hosted IT systems and computing to businesses of all sizes. Customers choose Rackspace for its hosting specialization and expertise, backed by the company’s award-winning Fanatical Support®. Customers can receive benefits such as higher quality, lower cost and better performance from Rackspace’s vast knowledge of industry best-practices.  Because Rackspace removes the burden of IT systems maintenance and management, customers can focus on key areas that differentiate their business. Rackspace’s portfolio of hosted services includes managed hosting (www.rackspace.com), email hosting (www.mailtrust.com) and cloud hosting (www.mosso.com).  Rackspace is recognized as one of FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best companies to work for, ranking number 32 on the 2008 list.  For more information on Rackspace Hosting please visit www.rackspace.com or call 800.961.2888. Visit our blog at www.rackspace.com/blog for further news and opinions.

Editorial Contacts:
Krisana Puccio
Product Marketing Manager
Mosso
210.312.5238
kpuccio@mosso.com

Halli Hollimon
Corporate Communications Manager
Rackspace Hosting
210.312.4617
hhollimo@rackspace.com

# # #

Mosso Brings Simplicity to the Power of the Cloud

The Hosting Cloud™ Delivers an Easier-than-Ever Platform for Deploying, Powering and Scaling Web Applications

SAN ANTONIO – Feb. 19, 2008 – Mosso® today announced a new and improved version of its core hosting offering. The newly named solution, The Hosting Cloud, is an advanced, easy-to-use, cross-platform cloud computing offering that, for the first time, allows for seamless scalability. The new approach eliminates the cost and complexity of scaling web infrastructure, specifically for developers and companies looking to deploy large web applications. The company also announced today new utility pricing for its business-class hosting solution.

The Hosting Cloud offers power without complexity to provide significant benefits for developers. Current solutions are often complicated and require additional coding to use. Mosso, on the other hand, enables developers to get their applications up and running in three easy steps: choose a domain, select operating system of choice and set default technology. Another important benefit of Mosso — round-the-clock live tech support — is rare among cloud compute providers. Other recently added features of The Hosting Cloud include Ruby on Rails, Windows2008/IIS7 hosting and SFTP access.

New Pricing Highlights

Currently, for $100 per month, The Hosting Cloud includes 24×7 live technical support (phone and chat) and simple, online software to manage projects and clients. It offers 500 GB bandwidth, 50 GB disk space and 3 million web requests per month — enough to power almost any website or application. The solution also offers unlimited web applications and email accounts, restricted only by the included resources. The newly added web request metric is more straight-forward, granular and outcome-based than other units and formulas used – in hosting, it’s about as close to pay-per-use there is. As traffic grows, customers ‘pay-as-they-grow’ through Mosso’s utility pricing model that delivers capacity when and where it’s needed.

With today’s announcement, Mosso now offers unlimited and automatic scaling for web applications. When a user exceeds the resources allotted in the $100/month membership, scale pricing kicks in to deliver just the capacity that’s needed.

Current pricing for additional capacity beyond the base membership is:

• Disk Space- $0.50/GB
• Bandwidth- $0.25/GB
• Requests- $0.03/1,000 requests

For more information about the new offering, please visit Mosso’s Pricing Page.

“At Mosso, our mission is to deliver on the promise of cloud computing – to make it as easy as possible for people to deploy and run web applications,” said Todd Morey, co-founder of Mosso. “We say code it, load it and go. We want to deliver the best possible service and support to our customers so that they can focus on running their businesses, not their applications.”

With The Hosting Cloud, developers do not need to worry about underlying technology such as servers, VPS’s or operating systems. The new solution combines a ‘best-practices’ hosting environment with easy online management — allowing the developer to choose the framework that best meets their needs. Mosso’s QuickDeploy™ provisioning system is designed to automatically configure and provision each layer of the technology stack in order to maximize performance so that web applications automatically scale as traffic surges. Mosso’s new utility pricing model ensures that subscribers then pay for only the capacity they use. The Hosting Cloud supports Windows and Linux platforms as well as leading technologies such as PHP, Ruby on Rails and .NET.

“On today’s Internet, the right piece of content can go viral more quickly than ever before, and Mosso makes scaling to serve the load very easy,” stated Jon Shumate, founder of Roseville, CA-based, web startup, Phoenomi, Inc. “We are a start-up focused on developing uniquely fun and viral web products which — as they grow — will need tremendous capacity. Mosso has figured out how to take the hard parts of scaling and make them automatic by adding a layer of scaling intelligence over the traditionally “dumb” service of hosting, and as a result they’ve become one hell of a cloud service.”

Mosso is a company of Rackspace, a leading provider of hosted IT services. The Hosting Cloud was created by Mosso to give developers access to the benefits of cloud computing without the technical complexities and trade-offs associated with existing solutions. To execute its vision, Mosso tapped into Rackspace’s technology expertise and deep resources to develop the next generation standards-based cloud computing technology that now runs The Hosting Cloud.

About Rackspace

A recognized leader in the global IT marketplace, Rackspace® delivers a diverse suite of enterprise-class hosted IT services to businesses of all sizes. Customers choose Rackspace for its hosting specialization and expertise, backed by the company’s award-winning Fanatical Support®. By integrating the industry’s best technologies and delivering them as services, Rackspace serves as an extension of its customers’ IT departments. Because Rackspace removes the burden of infrastructure maintenance and management, customers can focus on their core business. Rackspace’s portfolio of companies also includes the Mosso® (www.mosso.com) cloud computing platform and Mailtrust™ (www.mailtrust.com), a provider of business-class hosted email solutions. For more information on Rackspace, please visit www.rackspace.com, or call 800-961-2888.

About Mosso

Mosso, LLC is the home of The Hosting Cloud, providing enterprise-grade hosting through an easily managed interface so that developers, designers and IT managers can deploy reliable web applications quickly and easily. Founded by two former Rackspace employees, The Hosting Cloud is built upon a cross platform, clustered-computing architecture. For more information, visit www.mosso.com or call 1.877.934.0409.

Editorial Contacts:

Krisana Puccio
Product Marketing Manager
Mosso

210.883.7699

# # #

We are thrilled to be a member of Microsoft’s Go Live program and to be able to offer the new technology before official release. With Windows 2008 and IIS 7, Microsoft developed a web platform that is “hoster friendly”. Specifically, the new technology inherently supports clustering of sites across hosts through a shared configuration - which was a major issue in IIS 6. Our ability to provision, cluster and scale sites and applications is greatly enhanced by the advances in this technology.

With this release, customers will see benefits in provisioning (no more replication), increased stability and performance, and new technology options. The primary new technology in this release is support for .NET 3.5. Please read our original post for a more in-depth discussion of the platform.

We are proud to be a very early adopter of this technology. Thanks to all the beta testers for helping us test and prepare our new offering.

“While Mosso is not in everyone’s price range, it is massively scalable and currently hosts some of our Editor’s sites, some of which get as many as 500k pageviews per day. For high-traffic blogs that don’t want to run a dedicated server, we think it’s a steal for only $100 a month.”

Simplified Management
One of our biggest pain points with managing IIS 6 in a multi-tenant/web farm environment is the inability to replicate a single configuration to multiple cluster members. We worked around this problem by developing a custom replication agent, but it was extremely inefficient and error prone. Eliminating this bottleneck allows us to reduce our hardware requirements by 16 – 25% per cluster. Additionally, it means we no longer have to monitor a process that frequently caused problems for new sites customers create. With shared configuration in IIS 7, site configuration changes are replicated in real time as opposed to as long as an hour.

So far, the only problem we’ve experienced with this configuration is the inability to store the configuration on a network share and manage the server remotely. Microsoft is aware of the issue and is working to provide a fix, as this is a configuration they are supporting. Most likely this is an issue with impersonation/delegation in a two-hop authentication scenario.

Microsoft has also reduced the attack surface of IIS by fully modularizing the entire platform. When configuring IIS, you have the opportunity to customize the installation to fit the needs of your environment. Not only is this a benefit for our system operations team, but also for our customers because it means that their applications will benefit from these enhancements as well.

We also took a step forward and built our offering on a 64-bit platform. While our application pools are running in 32-bit mode by default, this will give us much more flexibility in how we scale the platform in the future. IIS 6 was plagued with limitations on non-paged pool memory, which will not be a limiting factor in our new configuration. While most web applications themselves do not benefit from a 64-bit application pool, we’ll be more than happy to make the switch for you.

Provisioning and Managing IIS 7 Hosted Resources
Less than a year ago, I was tasked with developing a new framework for provisioning sites on our IIS 6 platform. The only technology that could really do everything that we required was the antiquated Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) API. This was a very daunting and challenging task, even for a developer with five years of experience in Windows development environments. Most of the development was focused on trial and error. As a developer, I felt Microsoft had stuffed IIS 6 management into an unintuitive WMI container that really did not make sense for the application. After enduring a painful development cycle for our IIS 6 services, learning about the changes Microsoft had made to the management tools was a relief.

Developing the management tools for IIS 7 was truly a dream come true and shows that Microsoft really went the extra mile to ensure the management tools had received the same TLC that the rest of the platform did. I was surprised at how easy it was to interface with Microsoft.Web.Administration and make the API accessible over WCF. In fact, developing the new services took about half of the time that our original IIS 6 services required, which is a testament to the level of effort that went into these new APIs.

The .NET Framework 3.0 included WCF, which gives developers powerful new tools to develop interoperable web services. This was a major requirement of our new platform as our backend core provisioning system is completely Java-based. Integrating with our provisioning system via Axis2 was extremely straightforward and we weren’t forced to make any compromises to allow the two disparate platforms to work together.

If you’re like most of us, and developing with a heterogeneous platform in mind, then WCF will likely go a long way in meeting those requirements.

Built for Developers
For developers, Mosso’s offering of IIS 7 is extremely compelling. In fact, the offering has been engineered from the ground up with developers in mind, and many of us on the Mosso team use our own platform to develop applications. We took what we knew people disliked about our IIS 6 platform and we used that feedback to build our new offering. One of the biggest complaints we heard from developers was that they wanted to be able to run applications in full trust. While it wasn’t feasible in IIS 6, we were able to work directly with Microsoft to engineer a system that is able to accommodate this popular request without compromising the security, scalability, and performance of other users running in our cluster. We’re excited to open this opportunity up to our customers for the first time.

As with IIS 6, all Mosso customers are allocated their own application pool so that they can be confident that other applications running on the cluster will not interfere or cause an adverse impact on their applications. By doing this, we can optionally tune your application pool and your site so that it is optimized for your own needs. This is something that separates us from many of the other “budget” hosting providers.

Additionally, our IIS 7 offering inherits the same redundant, load-balanced platform that has allowed Mosso to be successful. As a developer, you no longer have to be concerned about resource utilization. We handle all of that for you. All you need to do is code it, load it, and watch it scale.

Our IIS 7 platform also includes full support for .NET 3.5, which provides numerous incremental improvements to the .NET Framework. Some of the new features the .NET 3.5 framework has are:

• LINQ
• Extension Methods
• Lambda Expressions
• Automatic Properties
• Object & Collection Initializers
• Anonymous Types

We are one of the first hosting companies to fully support .NET 3.5. While .NET 3.5 is only advertised as an incremental improvement, the new features offer a lot more flexibility for developers.

Start Developing!
While we’ve launched IIS 7 as a beta offering, we would encourage you to become more familiar with the features and start testing your applications on this new platform. We’ll be announcing plans soon to migrate all of our IIS 6 sites over to IIS 7. We encourage you to let us know what you think by e-mailing features@mosso.com.

This is an important point in our company’s history for us to join the ranks of blogging companies: 2008 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for Mosso, and we’ve been needing a place to publicly share some of our ideas and plans.

Over the next few months, we’ll be presenting some exciting new developments: we’re radically expanding our platform and infrastructure, launching a complete rewrite of our software and control panels, and making some changes to how we package and sell Mosso services.

None of this would be possible without the hard work of the Mosso team—a team that has grown considerably over the last year. You’ll get to meet many of the Mosso employees here in this blog as they post technical articles relevant to our platform and the web development community at large.

I’ll let Josh officially kick of the discussions with his experiences building the Beta of our new IIS 7 / .Net 3.0 offering. Thank you to all the dedicated web developers who have made Mosso possible. We look forward to delivering even more great features to you in 2008.

Todd Morey
Cofounder, Mosso