Since I had to move my other domains off below10host when they started to majorly screw with mod_security settings in a way that was so detrimental that my sites were breaking all over the place, and since hostgator, their replacement, had a little problem with double billing, I ended up on MediaTemple’s grid server, hearing it was gonna be the next best thing since sliced bread. Well, their mysql did a major crash and burn on average of a few dozen times a day, their grid setup didn’t give you stats on each domain but instead lumped them all together and didn’t work the whole time I was there anyway, the email from any domains except the “main” one were “redirected” addies from the main domain that caused problems with spam filters, then even when the website did load there was a pause of anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds before the information would start to show up even on a fast dsl connection, and the host manager panel was, though okay, not nearly as friendly nor easy to use as cpanel. I use three different reporting services for uptime checking, and during that period I was getting anywhere from 30-100 emails a day notifying me that one or more of my sites were down.

Someone just pointed out to me a post made on the Media Temple Blog a couple weeks or so ago, explaining what went wrong with the Media Temple grid server. I gotta say that their post really has me on a slow burn. They blamed the problem on their hosting clients. “Our new offering quickly became a refuge for sites that were kicked off their old hosting company; a common industry practice. Because of their high database load “requirements” and need of resources, these site owners were shut down immediately and told to leave other hosts. Many of these “orphaned” users had applications, code, and query instructions that were grossly inefficient for even a massive dedicated server. A number of these users came running to (mt) Media Temple with the promise that their applications, despite all of their deficiencies, would be accepted and not turned off. These users are radically different, by orders of magnitude, from anything we had previously analyzed or benchmarked.”

Now, I had one active site there, and a few in development phase that didn’t have any traffic. The single active site was a young site that was getting light, but steady traffic, anywhere from 50 to 80 unique visitors a day (at least I postulate that since it’s what I was getting prior to moving onto MT, when tracking stopped since Urchin was broken.) The Bitchslappin site runs on WordPress, a common application that’s used all over the web. I have never been kicked off any host, and I’ve never been dugg or slashdotted. I know many of the folks who posted on Web Hosting Talk’s thread about the Media Temple GridLock Debacle were as guiltless as I was, many with new sites they were just building on the most common of the open source web apps. Every site that routinely experienced problems was a mysql based site.

During the time of the problems, the support tickets went unanswered or were answered days later by a “form letter” without anything pertinent within the so called answer. Not only that but reports on Web Hosting Talk said they were massively overselling space to pay for their spanking new grid “solution”. MT saying it was OUR fault THEY failed is the worst sort of bad joke, regardless of whether they did get a few webhosting clients that were maybe subpar, and maybe it wouldn’t be a surprise if they did get a few “abusers” since the bandwidth, space and *cough* load balancing they were touting would attract heavy users. In other words, we early adopters were the guinea pigs, and there was no placebo.

Personally, after the experience I had with them, they could try and sell me hosting on a dedicated server for two bucks a year and I’d turn it down. Uptime is EVERYTHING in a host, and MT doesn’t deliver the goods.

The most shocking thing is the comments on that MT thread, and the amount of kissy-ass people who thought this explanation and the further promise of more improvements (after all the other broken promises) was enough to overcome MONTHS of shoddy, substandard non-service. If those commenters are willing to put up with this (lack of) quality of service, I’ve gotta wonder just how bad hosting in general is out there. I’ve had some rough experiences, but luckily DownTownHost, my current host on the reseller account, has been stellar so far.

Anyone else have any MT war stories?

Technorati Tags: Media Temple Grid Server, Web Hosting

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 10:51 pmunder Web News and . Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.