Been playing with smstextnews.com cloud computing

Mosso caught my eye, big time, the other day. Then today I caught SMS Text News reader (and Twitter follower) Jon Paul Davies’ brief post on Mosso and thought, ‘Yes, indeed. I like that idea!’

Now and again the SMS Text News server goes down, usually for two key reasons: –

1. Diskspace. I have some complicated backup stuff running all the time, backing up the mysql database every hour and sending it to a variety of different locations. If I haven’t been paying attention, the backups can use up the 200gb spare on the server quickly. Very quickly. Everything just comes to a halt at that stage.

2. Traffic surges. Apache goes nuts and the server simply can’t handle the short term explosion of readers. Not good. But certainly not a daily happening.

Having a prod around Mosso.com, I thought I’d give it a go. From what I can work out, they create an instance of Linux/Apache and PHP (exactly what I need) and let you get on with it, managing absolutely everything for you.

Theoretically all I need to do is upload the SMS Text News files and import the MySQL database and, hey presto, we’d be live in the cloud. Or without a physical server that we have to keep on managing.

We’re still playing. I’ll see. $100 a month gets you quite a lot too.

You can see the results (good or bad — or error messages galore at www.smstextnews.co.uk).