I recently opened an account in Mosso (www.mosso.com, part ofwww. rackspace.com) to host my sites. Indeed it is more expensive than other options. I pay $100 a month, and in similar services I could get something similar for $10 a month. (Similar services at least offer roughly same amount of space, unlimited sites, many GB of bandwidth)
So why I am paying 10x more. Well, for starters I am in the process of creating an app that I hope/dream will grow and I need the stability, scalability and performance of Mosso. That is one reason, the other is that they offer a customer service like I haven’t seen anywhere else. Email, knowledge base, forum you can get anywhere. But with Mosso I have a problem, I log in, click on live help and in snap I have someone helping me. Maybe not worth the full 10x difference, however it definitively pays.
They offer more services that no one else does, like billing your customers, and best of all you get 50 GB space (which is a lot for asp net sites) and 500GB of transfer. Quite a bit and enough for what I need now. And you pay more for what you need.
Of course you always look for a catch, and in this case I thought it is the compute cycle. They offer 10,000 compute cycles. Of course I have no idea of what that is, and was afraid of ending up paying a lot more for them. So here is what they say a compute cycle is.
Compute cycle: Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on the Cloud Sites. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.
You can read it here http://help.mosso.com/article.php?id=268
And then, how much is that? They also have an estimate.
Mosso says the following:
about 2.1 million page views using a database-driven content management system
about 11 million page views of mosso.com
about 25 million requests for a static 15KB image
http://help.mosso.com/article.php?id=269
Well, hope that helps