While planning the architecture for the new system that supports The Nightlife Network (http://carolinanightlife.com, http://illinoisnightlife.com, etc.) I came to the point where I had to decide on which scalable storage solution I wanted to use to store the 10,000+ existing photo albums for the sites... The biggest player in the cloud-storage market (to my knowledge) is Amazon, with their Simple Storage Service (S3). While this solution was a definite possibility (popular sites like Twitter and Base Camp use this service for their images and more), I wanted to at least check out one or two options so I could make a confident decision.

I had met with a colleague in Charlotte a week before who mentioned Mosso.com as he was using their Cloud Sites service to host his clients' websites. I visited their website and was pleased with their offering and really pleased that RackSpace was the company behind it. (Rackspace is notorious for great customer service).

I now had to make the decision between a good-looking but unknown service from Mosso, or a reliable (if somewhat cumbersome) service from Amazon. As with too many questions I have in life, I turned to Twitter for the answer.