We deleted our infrastructure. We are now infrastructure-less. Instead, we’re worth a few hundred meg and distributed across goodness knows how many servers, courtesy of Mosso, the cloud-computing company.

Aye, that’s right. We don’t have a single point of failure any more. Previously, we existed on a single, static (and fast, but, not really) dedicated server. It’s our duty, we reckoned, to support new and emerging technologies. And, obviously, if it sounds shit-hot, it might be worth a poke about. And the Mosso service definitely sounds interesting.

You should, for example, get a blazingly fast SMS Text News service, every time you access. The site’s code and databases are distributed throughout Mosso’s architecture so, theoretically, we can scale to the size of Microsoft.com without doing anything at all.

It’ll at least solve the digg-death issues that we sometimes get when too much traffic hit our server and shut it down.

Got any feedback? Is it any faster for you? I hope you notice some improvement!

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).