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Mobile Blog

An infrequent log of anything but not everything in my mobile world.

• More on the Media Temple vs. Mosso smack down
• Android vs Limo
• The Media Temple versus Mosso smack down
• Big management shake up at Docomo
• More on Docomo's Prada phone

More on the Media Temple vs. Mosso smack down

96% uptime on Media Temple

At the end of my Media Temple versus Mosso smack down I mentioned I was temporarily moving pukupi.com to Media Temple to test their email performance. The test didn't last long as in the first 24 hours I was down to 96% uptime which means I had no email or web services for almost an hour.

Pukupi.com has moved back to my dedicated server for some well earned stability.

Android vs Limo

If you're confused about the whole Android vs Limo thing, MobileCruch has an excellent summary.

The Media Temple versus Mosso smack down

A site on a shared or small dedicated server is unlikely to survive getting dugg, farked, slashdotted or stumbled but these usually irregular spikes in traffic don't justify moving to a large dedicated server capable of handling these spikes. Hosting clouds offer a relatively inexpensive solution to this dilemma by offering a shared cluster that gives your site the resources it needs during heavy traffic spikes and I've been planning of moving some of the domains under my wing to a cloud environment.

Both Media Temple and Mosso offer cloud hosting but after googling some reviews, it was clear both had suffered teething problems associated with this very new technology so I decided to setup test sites on both and monitor performance for a month before making any big domain move.

Testing Environment

I was primarily interested in testing LAMP performance so I moved pukupi.com to Mosso with a mirror on Media Temple. The Mosso site would get more traffic but not enough to dramatically effect results. Concerned that Media Temple's MySQL SmartPool may slow performance, I added a MySQL GridContainer to the Media Temple site.

I used Watchmouse for monitoring two separate tests for each site:

• Local test: a single checkpoint as geographically close to the test site as possible. A single checkpoint is the best indicator for time performance.
• Global test: random selected global checkpoints. Not a good indicator of time performance but can highlight weak backbone infrastructure.

For comparison, I also tested a dedicated server sitting in my Osaka office.

Important: Watchmouse has a very low default timeout period of 8 seconds which is a lot lower than the 30 seconds most web monitoring tools use. Watchmouse argues users are not going to wait 30 seconds for a page to load and I agree with their methodology but this means my monitoring results are going to harsher than if I'd used another monitoring tool. An error isn't recorded unless two checkpoints simultaneously report problems with the test site but the low timeout means it is very rare for any site to show 100% uptime.

It's now been just over a month so here's the results of my Media Temple versus Mosso smack down:

Price

Media Temple's Grid is US$20 per month with optional MySQL containers for US$20, $75 and $150 per month. Mosso's Cloud is a single US$100. Media Temple is a lot cheaper but less so once you start adding MySQL containers.

Winner: Media Temple but by a hair if you use a MySQL container.

Technology

Both offer LAMP and RoR but Mosso also offers a Windows environment which allows you to serve up PHP and .Net content from the same site. Mosso has also recently announced CloudFS scalable storage.

Winner: Mosso.

Administration

Both offer administrative interfaces that are simple to use but Media Temple's is more feature complete. Mosso has a new administrative interface in beta which looks interesting but is still behind Media Temple.

Winner: Media Temple.

Support

Both offer status feeds, a knowledge base, and forums. Media Temple supports users through a traditional support request form while Mosso offers live help and direct email to the company founders. I submitted a support request to Media Temple over some site performance concerns and got a response back within the day but it took a further day to resolve the issue. Mosso's live help is the best support I've ever experienced and they were able to resolve a problem I was having with setting up some sub-domains then and there.

Winner: Mosso by a country mile.

Uptime

Keeping in mind that my monitoring is particular harsh, both did well with uptime around the 99% mark. Media Temple had more regular spikes of downtime and Mosso was well ahead for most of the month but a couple of rough days at the end allowed Media Temple to catch up. Both sites were never truly down and were still accessible during monitored downtime; it just took longer than 8 seconds.

Local Uptime

Global Uptime

Winner: A draw.

Total Time Performance

Apart from a spike at the end of testing, Mosso performance was well ahead of Media Temple and even surpassed my dedicated server.

Local total time performance (connect + download)

Winner: Mosso.

Site Performance Index

Site Performance Index was developed by Watchmouse to quantify the users' perceptions of speed and availability of a site: below 1000 is very good, above 1500 is bad and above 2000 is a site in trouble. Again, problems in the last couple of days testing for Mosso add SPI penalties but Mosso still came out ahead of Media Temple.

Site Performance Index

Winner: Mosso.

Conclusion

Both Media Temple and Mosso appear to have got over the teething troubles they suffered in the earlier years but it would be nice to monitor both over a longer term. In the little smack down here, Mosso did better than Media Temple overall but downtime in the last couple of days raised some concerns. My dedicated server still offered the best overall performance but it would be unable to deal with any dramatic spike in traffic which is the reason for my interest in hosting clouds.

For now, I've temporarily moved pukupi.com over to Media Temple so I can test email availability which on Mosso was 100% and will blog the results if anything surprising shows up.

Overall Winner: Mosso.

Big management shake up at Docomo

Masao Nakamura's out and Ryuji Yamada's in.

More on Docomo's Prada phone

Docomo now has a nice press release to go with the Prada phone announcement.

Last updated: 2008-06-06 08:36:32 UTC; 83 days, 2 hours, 59 minutes, 14 seconds ago
Copyright © 2003-2008 Kyle Barrow