"CloudFS is the next step in our overall mission to provide the industry's most flexible and broadest range of hosting options -- from traditional complex managed hosting to cloud compute solutions," said Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce in a press release.

CloudFS launches today to a limited number of customers in free private beta. The private beta will last until the third quarter of 2008, at which time the service will open in a public beta. The target price at the time is $0.15/per gigabyte.

So far only Amazon of the big web companies have opened their hosting architecture up to outsiders, but a number of smaller players have tapped into the growing market for cloud based hosting solutions. Mosso's platform seeks to match the scaling power of a compute cloud with the ease and simplicity of a shared hosting environment.

Unlike competitors such as Joyent or Amazon, Mosso's system does not offer customers root level access to their servers. Instead, servers are preconfigured with a range of software options and are fully managed similar to a shared hosting environment. Keeping their hosting platform standardized is what allows them to easily monitor and scale the service as needed. For example, last week Mosso experienced a significant spike in load on its PHP cluster and added 10 servers without customers noticing, company executives told me.

Today, Mosso is announcing a new payment scheme that they feel is an industry first for a cloud computing platform. According to Mosso, scaling on Amazon or other compute cloud options means adding more instances, which means you're still paying on a server by server basis. Mosso's new pay structure is based 100% on requests, which they feel is more accurate in terms of charging you only for the resources you use.

Mosso's pay structure starts with a base fee of $100 per month, with a rate of $0.25 per gigabyte of bandwidth, and $0.50 per gigabyte of storage. They also charge $0.03 per 1000 requests with 3 million included. Being charged per gig on bandwidth and storage is a familiar pricing structure for anyone on shared hosting or a managed server.

The company is also announcing an updated control panel and will soon roll out a MySQL backup utility that will take automatic snapshots of databases down to the table level. That sort of utility wouldn't be possible on EC2, according to Mosso, because every instance is configured differently.

Note: Due to a miscommunication on our part we briefly ran this story yesterday on our web site when in fact the new Mosso pricing plan was not going live until today (February 19). We apologize for any confusion this caused.