What a Difference a Host Makes: How Media Temple is Ruining the Grids Good Name
This post was published 3 years 15 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.
I must admit, I was a Media Temple customer – for six long agonizing days. This showed me that Media Temple is destroying clustered hosting’s good name.
To give some background, UNEASYsilence used to be served at Hostway on a pair of Pentium 4 machines. After two years of strong growth we outgrew those poor little servers and had to look for a new host. At the time money was very tight, and I was enticed my Media Temple’s seemingly sweet Siren-esque calls offering cheap, yet powerful utility computing. Who can resist $20 a month for ‘crash proof’ hosting? After populating the MySQL table and testing, I flipped the switch and the system collapsed. That was the beginning of the deterioration of Media Temples previously high quality of hosting. The one thing I can never deny Media Temple is that they are passionate people. Their support technicians (who have been increasingly harder to contact lately) are dedicated hard working individuals. For those six days I dealt with kind customer service representatives who tried to coax the shoddy grid to stay online. After speaking with their lead technician several times, I was not convinced that Media Temple even understood how to properly admin a cluster. To show how little faith Media Temple has in their Grid, they refuse run their own website on it.
After some quick research I found one other provider in the US that had web server clustering, and signed up. That was the best hosting decision that the site could have ever made. The host: Mosso. They are based on the Rackspace’s high-end, high-availability network providing a strong foundation with their legendary uptime. Mosso was founded by Todd Morey and Jonathan Bryce, two freelance web developers, because they were once in a similar spot as me. They were not happy with the scalability of shared servers and shocked with the price (and lack of expandability) of dedicated server support.
After speaking with the founders, I knew they understand grid hosting, or as it is properly named-clustered hosting (the systems run in tandem not parallel). The clusters that power Mosso’s hosting are designed to do a specific task – and to do it extremely well. If a server is purposed for PHP 4, it will only have what is necessary to run PHP installed with all other unnecessary software features removed. Also, as demand for a specific task increases servers can dynamically repurposed to handle the additional load. An intelligent router analyses a web request and sends the data to be processed to the appropriate server. The really awesome thing is that with Mosso, a single website can run PHP (Both versions 4 and 5), ASP, HTML, Python, and Perl – all at the same time. I believe that is a hosting first. I can yammer on forever about the technical specs, but you can read them here (trust me you don’t want to try and recap them – I would get all the technical mojo confused). On Media Temple your PHP technology is selected for you, and there is no ability to select your hosting OS which is kind of restrictive.
Mosso’s support team, just like its technology, is top notch. I have an account manager that proactively monitors my account and the system to ensure the service lives up to their promises. Thinking that this site was getting preferential treatment, I had an associate of mine secretly sign up for the service, and he received the same quality of support for his less then 40-a-day visitor website as I did for mine. There are some drawbacks. The webstats are a little weak, email is not as full featured as I would like, there is no SSH or SFTP access, but all those features are being upgraded in the near future. Again, those technologies are minor setbacks. Mosso feels it is more important for them that they focus on keeping their hosted websites online and fully test technologies, unlike Media Temple who seemingly is beta testing their product at their customers’ expense.
In closing, Media Temple, instead of writing a dissertation about how you plan and fail repeatedly at fixing your serious problems STOP ACCEPTING NEW CUSTOMERS! Your infrastructure can’t handle the existing load, why add even more? Your recent Grid upgrade has crumbled, the SQL infrastructure doesn’t work (matter of fact it has recently destroyed customer data), your email (specifically SMTP server) doesn’t work, your web stats don’t work and your web servers don’t work as promised. We appreciate your candor about your struggles, but do us all a favor and shut down your grid or stop accepting new customers, you are giving the grid technology a bad name. Remember you get what you pay for!
Why am I ranting? It is to release some steam at Media Temple – they deserve it. But also to let web users know that there is an affordable, dynamically scalable clustered web host that cares about keeping your site online, and keeping the customer base happy.
We have seen some serious spikes in traffic and Mossos reliability has been nothing less rock solid. I’m sure the same will be true if this post gets Dugg, Mosso again will prove their reliability.
Dan, I believe that trying to getting MT slammed on digg for your 6 day experience is unfair. My thought can be found here:
http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/davak/2007/01/25/mediatemples-grid-service-improving/
I agree wholeheartedly with what’s been expressed here. We moved CreateDigitalMusic to MT’s grid after being kicked off 1and1 and Site5 for “resources abuse”. For the record, 1and1 were absolutely shocking, shutting down our site without any prior notice, nor any contact to tell us what had happened.. Site5 were at least decent enough to inform us that we were close to redlining the server so we could take steps to improve the situation.
Our site had been rock solid (if a little slow at times) on site5. The moment we hit the Grid things went bad. We had constant downtime. Techs contradicting each other and themselves, everything was utterly shocking. We were eventually convinced that we should switch to one of MT’s dedicated servers, and things actually got worse. Wordpress’ “error establishing a database connection” page was my constant companion. MT’s techs had no idea what was going on. It was a debarcle from start to finish.
MT, like Site5 before them have made bold promises about how their new cool hosting technology is going to “revolutionize hosting”, then rolled out products which just plain don’t work.
We’re now happily on a dedicated server managed by a friend of the site, since reaching parity with a clean apache/php install we’ve been solid and happy, and able to get back to the important stuff: writing content!
I’m not trying to get my site dugg so slam Media Temple. I am point out their patterns in their patterns in the past, and how they are operating as of now. I’m glad you think the Grid quality is improving – because frankly it can’t get worse!
And the above writeup ONLY APPLIES to the GRID, I can’t speak for the Dedicated servers.
Also, Media Temple is invited to respond – but for every accusation I made I have facts to back them up fully.
What you say maybe true and could be based upon facts but we need to know what % of customers have experienced this problem in MT
Nowadays big web forums are run by hosting companies themselves and therefore are biased. The hosting reviews are almost always skewed.
Blog reviews are the only hope for the future to find the best host and to avoid the worst.
I wonder when an unbiased and objective forum will be created which will give the actual facts about hosts?
Chris
http://www.chrisranjana.com
I don’t quite understand what you meant by “On Media Temple your PHP technology is selected for you” as it looks like their grid server lets you choose between 4 & 5 (http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/) It is interesting that you point out that (mt) has lost or destroyed customer data because of their MySQL setup. I couldn’t find any references to this, do you actually know someone who lost data?
One thing that kind of bothered me about this post was the fact that you say “do us all a favor and shut down your grid or stop accepting new customers” while sporting a conspicuously placed Mosso logo. Looks like a few people have pointed this out over on Digg.
Nope, the post is not sponsored by Mosso. This is a review of my interaction on the Mosso system, and is my opinion based on facts that I have gathered. And I do have proof the MySQL data was accidentally destroyed. The banner is displayed because I am proud of the platform as you can read we are “Powered by Mosso” not “Sponsored by Mosso”. Hope that clears things up.
For the record I am a current Mosso AND MediaTemple customer.
Agreed- we jumped onto MT after Dreamhosts’ horrible September and were promptly greeted with downtime and email woes. After being assured that this would all go away by moving to the Grid, we moved. And the problems got a lot worse. Then i went to Mosso. Just about the same time a spammer got them blacklisted for about 2 weeks, crippling a lot of my companies outgoing emails. Finally, we got a VPS on Liquidweb and have had ZERO problems, not even a hiccup since. Dedicated IP and resources is the way to go.
While things still aren’t perfect, have a look at the known issues now. They did a whole bunch of configuration changes today, leaving only the MySQL issue remaining. The MySQL issue is going to be resolved in a little over a month with the release of MySQL containers, so hopefully things will be better then.
http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/
As many others are already aware, the Grid has definitely experienced its share of downtime. Personally, the bulk of these issues that I have experienced have been limited to MySQL errors / unavailability. Hosting customers must recognize the difficulty in forecasting the amount of traffic generated by its customers. When the Grid was announced, many, including myself, believed that the system could withstand large surges of traffic due “redundant everything” (as Paul was cited as saying). In reality, these initial presumptions actually contributed to the recent outages experienced by customers.
The shortcomings were discovered as major site administrators viewed the Grid as an opportunity to offload their massive amounts of traffic while saving a significant amount of money. $20/mo for 100 GB’s of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth was too enticing to pass up. The initial stability that MT convinced customers about was immediately crippled as massive sites quickly consumed crucial resources resulting in the downtime that many, including myself, have cried and shaken our fists at.
Has (mt) disappointed or fallen short (of expectations) in regards to the Grid? In a way, yes. My initial expectations were surely clouded by the “hype” surrounding this new revolutionary hosting package offered to the the public at an affordable price. However, it is important to note that the team behind the Grid is actively making improvements in order to resolve the issues that customers have reported. Ronald linked the Sytem Incidents page which is an example of the current problems / resolutions that the (mt) staff is aware of.
Media Temple continues to develop new technologies – one of which includes the new Container Technology created to alleviate the stressful MySQL errors that have shown face over the past few months.
From Dreamhost and Bluehost, to Media Temple and Mosso, whichever hosting solution you decide to run with… Understand that 100% uptime is non-existent – a dream. Weigh your options and recognize disadvantages of each. Worried about the Grid and uptime? Consider going Dedicated (dv). Considering Mosso? Understand that they’re somewhat restrictive as far as administrative rights are concerned – WordPress inline template editing (disabled). Each host has their Pro’s & Con’s, weigh both sides before jumping in without testing the waters. Eugene, as I am sure others do as well, balances multiple hosts to move back and forth between. If you’re serious about uptime and staying visible to readers, don’t pinch pennies and expect the red carpet all the way to the front page of Google.
And with that, I close the comments. I think we have covered all bases here.
I agree MT is aggressively fixing the problems, but the fixes still are not living up to the promises set forth when they sell the product. But eventually they may.
Again, I am a CUSTOMER of BOTH Media Temple and Mosso so I see the strengths and weaknesses of both companies first hand. I was writing about MY experiences and opinions of both companies. No money exchanged hands, no secret motivations. I think it was also good to clear the air and have a real conversation about this matter.
The lesson is: Carefully read about your host before you select them. For some people 1&1 is more then enough, others need Rackspace. The sea is filled with hosts. I prefer Mosso. They provide the level of service and support that I demand and have handled my high traffic load perfectly.
This article reflected the state of Media Temple when the article was written. I am sure in time MT will achieve what they want to achieve. They just are not there yet.
Closing statement: Buyer beware! Do your homework before selecting a host, there are many good ones there are many bad ones. Read as much as you can before you make your decision.
If you feel more comments need to be added to this post please email us at tips@uneasysilence.com