Q&A: Jonathan Bryce, Mosso

• By theWHIR.com , October 07, 2008

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Q&A: Jonathan Bryce, MossoIn an email conversation with The WHIR, Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce discusses how Mosso's Hosting Cloud is providing YouDecide2008.com, a political blog and website, handle tremendous time-sensitive and election-related spikes in traffic.

By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

October 7, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Last week, Rackspace Hosting's (www.rackspace.com) cloud computing division Mosso (www.mosso.com), revealed it is providing a scalable, on-demand hosting solution for YouDecide2008.com (www.youdecide2008.com).

Founded by political information junkie and IT industry professional Nathan Ashworth, the bi-partisan website delivers up-to-the-minute US election content, including commentary, speeches, surveys, video, general information and news.

The site has experienced significant demand in traffic leading up the days of the election. For instance, in January, the website increased from 25,000 visitors to more than 300,000 in a single day, causing the site to crash after its shared hosting provider could not scale to support the sudden spike in traffic.

Given these unpredictable demand increases during the election season, the organizers decided to seek a hosting solution that could support such this demand. Eventually, YouDecide2008.com approached Mosso to deploy its flagship hosting solution, The Hosting Cloud, providing the site with cost-effective clustered processing, load-balancing, and redundant storage.

Since migrating to Mosso, Ashworth says that YouDecide2008.com has managed to stay up and running with usage numbers spiking more than 600 percent during crucial points of what is arguably one of the nation's most exciting presidential elections in a long time.

The WHIR talked to Jonathan Bryce, Mosso co-founder, about the details behind its hosting agreement with YouDecide2008.com, and how The Hosting Cloud solution provides a scalable hosting solution to support high performance sites that experience traffic surges.

How did YouDecide2008.com end up settling on Mosso as its hosting provider?

Jonathan Bryce: They approached us. Since they moved, they've seen their traffic spike more than 10 times during debates, and they needed a host that could handle that kind of bursting without having massive up-front fees and high ongoing fixed costs.

What exactly does the Mosso Hosting Cloud solution entail for the delivery of the website?

YouDecide2008.com runs in a standard Mosso PHP cluster backed by MySQL. They operate on our standard servers, networking and storage configurations, which we fully administer for them.

What is it specifically about Mosso's cloud computing technology that enables it to scale a website that gets as much traffic as YouDecide2008?

Our teams have a lot of experience and expertise in configuring environments that are engineered to be scalable from the beginning. This allows a site like YouDecide2008.com to be able to upload their app, and once it is functioning, avoid doing much work to handle traffic increases.

Every application deployed is load-balanced from the beginning. Our environments are standardized so that we can shift resources or move applications and databases between environments as needed.

We employ commercial and proprietary monitoring and metrics that allow us to identify bottlenecks and help customers resolve them. These design decisions have helped us handle the frequent traffic spikes we see from customers.

Is Mosso hosting any other websites affiliated with the 2008 presidential election?

We host several other high-profile sites that are affiliated with the election, but unfortunately, we are not able to release the names. Those customers have asked us to keep that confidential. Maybe they view us as a competitive advantage and don't want to let their secret out until the election is locked up.

What is Mosso's customer breakdown in terms of SMBs versus larger enterprises?

The majority of our customers are developers and SMBs. In the enterprise space, we've seen some traction in individual departments - like marketing - of enterprises that need hosting quickly. IT departments are overworked and under funded, and we provide an option that can augment those strained resources for hosting projects that are time sensitive.

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