The MoSGrid portal offers an approach to carry out high-quality molecular simulations on distributed compute infrastructures to scientists with all kinds of background and experience levels. A user friendly web interface guarantees the ease-of-use of modern chemical simulation applications well established in the field. The usage of well-defined workflows annotated with metadata largely improves the reproducibility of simulations in the sense of good lab practice. The MoSGrid science gateway supports applications in the domains quantum chemistry (QC), molecular dynamics (MD), and docking. This paper presents the open-source MoSGrid architecture as well as lessons learned from its design.