Mosso says The Hosting System is one of the first hosting offers aimed specifically at the Web designer and developer community. The system is managed through a Web-based application that lets developers provision clients, Web sites, email accounts, databases and other services on demand.

The company says The Hosting System contains all the elements of a true utility infrastructure and is based on proprietary technology, which deploys each Web site or application across entire clusters of servers, all working together and poised to reroute Web traffic should any component experience failure. The Hosting System, says Mosso, offers the performance and space of a dedicated server, but has the reliability of a fully managed, clustered environment.

Todd Morey, co-founder of Mosso, says he developed the concept for the company and The Hosting System in partnership with Jonathan Bryce, a friend he met while employed with Rackspace. There, Morey took care of the design side of projects while Bryce took on the development. They realized that outside of discount-priced dedicated servers, there weren't any ideal hosting options available for designers and developers, so they collaborated and created Mosso.

"We thought that [designer] demographic, even though it's really important to the Internet, was strangely neglected," says Morey. "To get a server to the $100 price point, a lot of what's done in the marketplace is to slash features. A lot of those dedicated servers out there have one hard drive, no firewalls, no backup solutions and no control panel included. Those are usually cost-plus features. So, while the price was right for anyone doing some designing for their clients, we really thought the offering was wrong because one of the biggest differences with these guys, and one of the things we learned from our own experience, is if you mess up the hosting solution for your client you're typically not just losing a $15 a month client, this is also someone you've done hundreds or thousands of dollars of design work for."

Morey says he and Bryce developed The Hosting System to be a user-friendly as possible. The company built its own control panel with a suite of features Morey says are similar to those found on Plesk or cPanel, but focused on the elements most useful for designers and developers. Those include adding client email accounts, built-in domain registration and ftp access to add unique content that Mosso will administers. Along with hosting, Mosso offers tech support and client billing for an additional cost. The company says this furthers its goal of simplifying the site administration side of running a Web-based business.

Morey says that based on the generally positive feedback he has received about The Hosting System, he feels that the company on the right track with for its target audience, as well as the hosting industry as a whole.

"Mosso means 'animated' in Italian. If you read sheet music and you see piu mosso, it means play with more energy, more passion, more animation and we love that connotation," says Morey. "We thought to ourselves that there was nothing right for these [developers and designers], that the hosting industry wasn't really doing its part to help them out, so we wanted to approach this issue with as much enthusiasm as they do putting their sites together. Our interest in utility computing has been to provide something that works for these clients so they're not having to mess with hardware - make it very accessible, make it something where you don't have to do custom developments to make it work - and we really feel that is where utility makes the most sense. Utility computing is where hosting is going."