I’ve been with numerous web hosts in my nearly fifteen years on the Net. Some shared hosts are absolute nightmares (DreamHost was the worst). Still, you can usually walk away without leaving much money on the table. But Media Temple isn’t for the budget conscious. Its (gs) Grid-Service sounds sexy and makes good sense, but it’s over-priced and doesn’t live up to the hype (Media Temple even admits as much; see below).
After some nine months of ho hum hosting and lackluster support, I’m giving Media Temple a rest. Yesterday, I moved the last of my domains that remained there to AN Hosting.
Here’s why…
Sloooow Service, or The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back
Two days ago, I had problems sending email on my ThemeMeme account with AN Hosting. The same day, my wife noticed that her domain (hosted at Media Temple) was having the same problem. As it turns out, the problem seems to have been with my ISP, but I didn’t know that when I contacted support at both hosts.
AN Hosting took only 22 minutes to respond, better than their usual response time of an hour or two. Media Temple took 26 hours and 21 minutes to respond to the same issue. This isn’t an exception. Media Temple usually took anywhere from several hours to more than a day to respond to support requests.
The Designer Jeans Fallacy, or The Price of Prestige
For some strange reason, there are people who routinely pay $150 or more for a pair of jeans. I’m just guessing, but I bet most of these people are not bloggers or web designers. So why are you paying twenty bucks a month for hosting on Media Temple?
Media Temple has a lot of high profile customers, but you pay a premium for the prestige of having a Media Temple badge on your site. The (gs) Grid-Service includes 100 GBs of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth, more than enough for most bloggers. But it’s $20 a month (or $170 if you pay for the year, as I did).
AN Hosting doesn’t offer much prestige. They don’t have a cool logo. But they offer five times as much storage and bandwidth for $6.95 a month (even less if you sign up for a longer term).
Personally, I’ll stick with AN Hosting and my $35 Levi’s.
But price isn’t really the problem. If the (gs) Grid-Service lived up to the hype, it’d be worth it, which is why I signed up in the first place and why you may be tempted. Keep reading.
Can I get that in writing? Or, Gee, that sounds great! Do you guarantee it?
Media Temple describes the (gs) Grid-Service is glowing terms:
Beyond simple load balancing, the Grid uses an ever-expanding “cluster of clusters” all working together to serve your site with blazing fast response times. Resource limits, hardware failures and everything else you hate about shared hosting is history! The Grid was designed and built with numerous layers of redundant hardware, software, network and power systems. Downtime caused by device failures will be a distant memory once you switch to The Grid.
With so many benefits, you’d think Media Temple would offer a generous, money-back uptime guarantee. They don’t. Instead, Media Temple offers this money-back guarantee:
If for any reason a customer wishes to discontinue service with (mt) Media Temple they may do so and a refund will be issued.
As long as you discontinue service within 30 days of opening your account.
Hey, every host I’ve ever been with has had a hiccup now and then. But I want a host that will credit my account when the service sucks. AN Hosting offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. When they have a problem, they offer to give your money back before you even ask for it.
The GPU Problem
Though Media Temple offers 1 TB of bandwidth, the reality is that you’ll probably never get to use it, even if you have a popular site. You’ll hit your GPU limit long before you take advantage of the bandwidth offered.
GPU stands for Grid Performance Unit, a measure of your actual usage on the grid. According to Media Temple:
Each (gs) Grid-Service hosting plan includes a large number of GPUs which have been carefully calculated to provide 99.7% of all customers with enough resources to never exceed the GPU allocation. For those clients operating large scale web sites experiencing daily or infrequent traffic surges, GPUs allow you to host your websites without worrying about reaching an arbitrary limit before getting shut down.
There’s only one problem with this. Almost everything sucks GPUs: 404 errors, your Mint stats, scripts, etc. I easily burned about 250 GPUs a month when my sites were getting only a couple of thousand page views a day. If you have a high traffic site, there’s a good chance you’ll hit your GPU ceiling. Additional GPUs are billed at $0.10 per GPU. I burned about 30 GPUs a month just on Mint. If that had been in excess of my quota, I’d be paying another $3.00 a month just for my stats.
And it’s true: 99.7% of customers won’t need more resources for the simple reason that they don’t need the Grid. They simply don’t have the traffic. There’s no reason for them to pay the premium Media Temple commands.
Hey! That’s MySQL!
The real problem with the Grid-Service is that it won’t help you with a slow MySQL database. If you’re hosting a WordPress blog (or any blog that uses MySQL, as most of them do), you can have plenty of GPUs and still have slow performance because you’re sharing a MySQL server. Now, to be fair, this is true of any other host. But that’s another reason why Media Temple isn’t worth the premium; it does nothing to eliminate this bottleneck.
Media Temple offers two MySQL options with the Grid-Service: MySQL SmartPool, which it claims “offers performance comparable to industry-wide shared hosting systems,” and MySQL GridContainers, which offer a kind of virtual dedicated MySQL server. If you want a GridContainer, it will set you back anywhere from an additional $20 to $150 a month.
When I noticed that my sites were slow, I contacted Media Temple support:
Why are my sites so slow to display, taking 5 to 10 seconds or more?
I recently moved one of my domains, upstartblogger.com, to another host and it is loading in 1 or 2 seconds, even though the site is heavier.
I’m not getting the performance I expect from MT. What gives?
They offered a few suggestions for optimizing my databases, along with the suggestion that I pay for a MySQL GridContainer. Here’s my response:
I enabled WPCache, deleted all but the essential Mint peppers, and repaired and optimized my database. My site is still very slow, sometimes taking a minute or more for Mint. I find it odd that Media Temple is displayed prominently on the Have a Mint site, yet you’re claiming it is too demanded [sic] for your shared hosting. I shouldn’t have to pay $40 a month for shared hosting and a MySQL container to get decent performance when I can get better performance from a cheap shared host. I’ll be moving my sites. The Grid is a great idea, but it’s not worth the money.
And their reply (emphasis mine):
We apologize for your experience with the (gs)Grid-Service. I can understand if you need to move your sites to a new service, but hope that you may consider us again in the future. We are developing a successor to the (gs) which we are calling the (cs)Cluster-Server. The new product is being designed with a new architecture to address the shortfalls of the (gs), especially latency. Our experience with the (gs) has taught us quite a lot about the limitations of web hosting in a distributed environment, and we promise not to offer a product that does not deliver a significant performance increase over our current offering. Building on top of our current (gs) platform or applying band-aids is not the goal here. We are undergoing a full revamp that will address many of the concerns and feedback provided by our customers this past year.
Even the Grid Goes Down
In theory, the Grid-Service means downtime “caused by device failures will be a distant memory,” but that doesn’t mean the Grid never goes down. You’ll still find maintenance messages in your inbox from time to time (emphasis mine):
This maintenance action will require that parts of the Grid be briefly taken offline. A very short period of downtime may occur, customers should prepare for a brief disruption of services such as web, email, and ftp. It is likely that only a small portion of the maintenance window will actually be needed. Any email inbound to your server during the maintenance window will not be rejected or lost.
We would like to remind all customers that scheduled maintenance and security related updates are a necessary and vital aspect of web hosting that ensures the long term uptime and reliability of your server.
Don’t Panic. I mean, Can’t Panic!
My main tool for editing online files is Panic’s wonderful Coda application. Unfortunately, for some strange technical reason, you can’t really use Coda with Media Temple. It establishes too many connections and bogs down when you try to save. When I tried to get support for this issue, Media Temple pointed their fingers at Panic and Panic pointed their fingers at Media Temple. Unless I’m missing something, let’s just say that Coda and Media Temple don’t play nice with each other.
Media Temple is Greedy. And Stingy.
Not only is Media Temple over-priced, but they aren’t very generous in paying for referrals. Not that this is the most important criteria for selecting a host, but if you have some traffic on your site, there’s no reason for anyone to pay for hosting. A single referral from AN Hosting pays for a year of hosting. Media Temple pays a tight-fisted twenty bucks, about a month of their ho hum hosting. Even DreamHost pays more (I have nothing good to say about DreamHost, but if you still want to host with DreamHost, give them a try. Somebody likes ‘em.)
I haven’t found the perfect host, but AN Hosting comes as close as any I’ve experienced. It’s my best recommendation and, in my experience, at least as good as Media Temple at a fraction of the price. If you’ve made it this far, try AN Hosting now!
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Looking for a host that does’t suck? I’ve been with probably 20 different hosts. The best, hands down, is AN Hosting. Why not sign up with AN Hosting now?!
I’ve been using BlueHost for a few years now. Honestly, I can’t recall any downtime since I first signed into cPanel.
I’ve heard a lot about Media Temple and, at one point, actually considered it. The website is slick, especially for a hosting provider.
Too bad that means absolutely nothing.
I’ve heard some good things about BlueHost, but I’ve stayed away from them for one reason: I’ve often gone to a site that was listed on Digg or StumbleUpon that displayed the BlueHost favicon and the site was suspended. They seem very quick to suspend accounts that see a spike in traffic.
In case you haven’t checked them out yet I highly recommend WebFaction ( http://www.webfaction.com ).
Someone had the same problem as you with Media Temple and moved over to WebFaction and their site was much faster after the move. See http://www.istherefood.com/2008/03/27/webfaction-versus-media-temple for the full story.
I hadn’t heard of WebFaction before. Not the cheapest and the packages aren’t very generous, but still more than the vast majority of bloggers would need. They might be great, though. Worth a look.
I’ve felt your pain first hand when it comes to talking about the Media Temple Grid. When that service was first announced, I was amongst the few early testers. I’ll be honest and say that there were times when I wished I was back on Dreamhost servers. There were very high hopes and expectations for the GS hosting plans but it looks to be an ever evolving – hopefully maturing – service.
However, I did want to point out some things that raised my eyebrow. Again, I fully understand your frustrations. (I was in the same shoes before I moved from the Grid to a DV hosting plan.)
* Mint is resource heavy. Weighing the options with the eye candy of Mint, it’s a tough call. If you decide to run Mint as your analytics package, you need to accept the fact that you are basically running a service which equals another lightweight site.
* Panic’s Transmit FTP application exhibited connection errors as well. It has to do with the PASV mode for data transfers. Essentially if you’re constantly trying to keep the connection open to the server, you will have issues. This is something I’ve experienced with other hosts – and is not limited to Media Temple
* Customer service – for the most part – has been great from what I’ve experienced. Today alone I filed a ticket this morning because I was unable to access Plesk. Within 20 minutes of filing, I received an explanation and a link to a KB article explaining how to optimize apache for better memory management. I have heard of bad stories as well. Out of curiosity, how was your experience when phoning their 24/7 support line?
Anyway, back on topic. The GS hosting plans are not reliable and I have yet to recommend them to anyone who anticipates a few thousand uniques per day. If you’re looking for better service, from MT, it will cost quite a bit more for their DV plans. It comes down to how you use resources. if you continue to share themes like your awesome ThemeMeme Vero, understand that you will eat up resources quickly. I can’t comment on AN, but looking at their site, their referral structure, and reviews, it reminds me of an early Dreamhost. As the number of users increase on your shared hosting plan, the likelihood of bumps in the road increases as well.
Thanks very much for your comment, Derek. Nice to hear from you. I’m a big fan of your WordPress themes!
You make some good points:
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Mint is so resource heavy, but it’s a little disconcerting to watch it run up the meter. I don’t have to think about this with AN Hosting.
Regarding Panic Coda, not being able to use it was a definite pain. I use it almost exclusively for editing files and it works seamlessly with An Hosting.
Re: customer service, I’ve found MT to be very slow to respond. The help is fine when they finally respond, but I’ve found them to be much slower than AN Hosting. In my case, the few times I’ve called, the phone support wasn’t very helpful or they tried to sell me add-on services, like a MySQL Container. (BTW, AN Hosting’s phone support isn’t very knowledgeable either, but the real techs almost always respond by email within an hour or two.)
It may be that MT’s support is better for their DV customers and that the (dv) Dedicated-Virtual service is a better option. I have been tempted to give it a try. But for most bloggers, MT is just over-priced over-kill.
Media Temple sucks, not only gs, vps too… I pass a little websites to a vps in Media Temple and always have downtime, in bluehost I have http://www.grupoalianzaempresarial.com with a database with more than 576000 enterprises (you can verify) and other 80 domains with more than 30 000 uniques daily (total), and maybe you can´t see the website down.
Or Bluehost is an incredible provider or Media Temple vps really sucks, or twice ;)
Angel, I’ve heard mixed things about BlueHost, though some people do love them.
I’ve been with Media Temple on their grid service for about 8 months and it’s been fairly unstable the entire time. My site went down 3 different times on Saturday for example. I run an external monitor to ensure availability and unfortunately, I’m only seeing about 98% uptime right now.
The worst part is that for about 10% of the time, the site loads very slowly. I wrote more with some details on my blog:
http://www.jimgoings.com/2008/04/media-temple-kills-my-inner-child/
Jim, your story seems pretty typical. MT is very slow to respond and when they do, their solution is to up sell. Their other services may be fine, but the grid sucks.
I use Media Temple for all my sites which include a forum and a blog and I don’t have any issues with them. Sure when they first got the GS up and running there were some issues but overall I’ve had no serious problems with them. Speed seems fine to me on all my sites. Some times there is some downtime but MT usually lets you know through an email.
Their customer service is always helpful and they respond quickly. Their account center is very well designed and they also have a special iPhone version which is a plus for me.
I also buy $150 jeans. :)
Well, I don’t get it Antonio. My site still goes down once a day or so although overall performance seems to have improved.
Their customer service is hit or miss… sometimes they answer the same day, sometimes it takes days. Also, they just don’t seem to want to acknowledge the extent of the issues.
Antonio, I wish I could say I had a similar experience with MT. Their uptime is good, but that doesn’t mean much when you can’t connect to your database, which happened frequently when I was hosted with them. Also, their customer service was very slow to respond, especially in comparison with AN Hosting, at least in my experience. The back end, and the iPhone version of it, are well-designed, but I find cPanel just as easy.
I’ll stick with my Levi’s.
Nice redesign of AisleOne, BTW!
Robert thanks!
I guess performance is different for everyone but I don’t see why some of you are having issues with customer service. Do you call them or submit a ticket? I always call on the phone and I get someone right away who always helps me out.
I will admit though that it’s a bit pricey.
Antonio, I’ve almost always submitted a ticket. I didn’t find them that helpful on the phone and I don’t like to wait on hold.
I usually submit a ticket… that way there’s a clear record of the request and follow-up actions.
I called once when I first signed up about the fact that my site was taking 10+ seconds to load. I ended up speaking with a manager (can’t remember his name) who was pretty level with me that they were having some performance and capacity issues with their storage systems.
Things only got worse for me… although as I said earlier, my site is performing better in the last few days although it does do down once or twice a day.
Great Post on your Blog Robert. I moved my company’s websites and email to MT only to find that their hype does not match their performance. Your comments are dead on accurate. Yes, they have customers that are happy, but I think those are people who don’t need uptime during (at least) work hours and consistantly. I’m sitting here on hold with them as I type (25 minute wait) since they’ve been down since last night. The whole idea behind gs was that it held the potential to dodge bullets, stay up and stay in the background. At the very least, mirror it all over and keep it up. To my astonishment, grid one seems to go down monthly and at very inappropriate times. The whole reason we went to these guys FOR THIS PRICE was to get uptime. Who the hell cares whether it it’s a distributed architecture if it doesn’t work? The only reason I got talked into going with mt was due to a theory that supported the hope of making the service immune from going down. Boy was I wrong in choosing Mediatemple. Thanks Robert, you’ve just helped me decide to go elsewhere.
I had lots of problems with email when I was with MT. The grid is a great idea, but it just doesn’t live up to the hype.
I have used Lunarpages for several years and have had a great experience. I host several sites there now. Phone support is pretty fast, email support is good. The features and price are competitive.
I agree that MT is slow and not worth the cost. I used them back when 400MB was a lot of space and ended up very disappointed with their service. The only good thing they had going was their branding and the ‘Hosted by MT’ badges on the cool, hip sites.
It’s nice that the average user has so many choices in hosting these days. I’ve been quite happy with Dreamhost for some time and decided to stay with them after that billing snafu some months back. I tried AN Hosting for a bit but didn’t care for their control panel.
Nick, AN Hosting’s control panel is the industry standard cPanel. I’ve been with so many hosts, and most of them use it, that I actually prefer it. It doesn’t look great, but I find it easy to navigate.
MT’s control panel is slick and pretty easy to use, but that’s not a good enough reason to pay about $15 a month too much for it. I never liked DreamHost’s control panel, but there are so many other reasons to stay away from them. Glad to hear that you’re happy with them, though. Love the photos on your site!
Hi,
I’m really looking for a new host to which to move. Do you stand behind AN? I heard so many stuff being said before about hosts, but in the end, it turned out to be paid advertisement.
I have had ixwebhosting, which I did not really have a lot of issues wit (because I did use them very lightly), and siteground, which at first I had a lot of problems connecting via ftp, and getting a drupal site to work properly.
If you stand behind AN, I’ll try and give them a try.
Great themes, btw.
Avi, I’ve been with several hosts over the years, including AN Hosting, Media Temple, DreamHost, Hosting Zoom, DZones (which became IX Web Hosting), GoDaddy, 1&1, Insider Hosting, and a few others I can’t remember. The truth is, they’re all bad.
AN Hosting isn’t perfect, but in my experience they’re the best of the shared hosts. There are no guarantees, but I endorse them because I haven’t found a better shared host. And yes, I do make a commission if you sign up with them, but I wouldn’t recommend them if they weren’t the best I’d found. I don’t recommend MT or DreamHost.
If you decide to use them, use code FUTUROSITY for 3 free months. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can try them and cancel if they don’t meet your expectations.
Like you, I run a high-traffic Wordpress blog with Mint. In recent months loading has slowed to a chore, with 503 errors frequently occurring. My host hasn’t been able to find a permanent solution, short of asking me to switch to a dedicated server.
I’ve been doing some hosting-plan window-shopping and was seriously considering Dreamhost or Media Temple until I saw this post.
Anyway, you have convinced me to sign up with AN Hosting and I just purchased a 12-month plan for my blog. Hope things work out fine.
Thanks for the in-depth comparison between the 3 :) It’s been a lot of help.
One more thing: Absolutely loved their Live Chat service. The person I chatted with was a lot of help.
PS: I used your coupon code too!
Thanks, Veron! Wise move staying away from MT and DreamHost. I think you’ll be happy with AN Hosting. Good luck!
Like you, I went through a healthy list of hosts before my present home.
Media Temple, old school shared ->
Dreamhost ->
Mosso ->
SteelPixel ->
MT (gs) ->
MT (dv)
The (gs) sucked when it was launched. HUGE letdown. I’ve been happy with my (dv) and now have a second one. (I have a 3.0 and a 3.5)
As for support, I emailed 2 hours ago about a failure when restarting my virtual server, and subsequent downtime. I had a response within 20 minutes. I pinged them later asking for an update and the support tech replied shortly thereafter. We’ve been going back in forth in near real-time on the status of things, and he’s now let me know a physical issue is being investigated. Getting anxious earlier — I’ve got clients on this box — I actually considered picking up the phone (and found your site while searching for MT support criticism). Then a reply came in. I consider their responsiveness to be pretty solid.
I’ve pointed mon.itor.us at my sites and typically see 99.5-100% uptime. If it’s less than that, their side by side comparison shows the same numbers as Google, so I attribute it to their own network.
Glad you hear your experience was more positive than mine, Mark. Seems the MT (dv) is pretty solid, if it’s worth the money for someone. They must prioritize their support, though. They were very slow to respond to my MT (gs) issues.
I just wanted to ask how recently your experiences with Dreamhost were – I have a number of colleagues who very openly swear by them, and I recenlty moved to them on their recoomendation – reading one of your posts on upstartblogger I noticed that maybe it’s been sometime since you used them – but you still spend a lot of air time advise people against using them. Why is this?
It’s true, my nightmare experience with DreamHost happened sometime ago. I continue to hear about DreamHost problems, however. I suppose it’s possible they’ve gotten better, but I’m skeptical. I hope your experience is better.
If someone is interested in giving them a try, they can use the code ThemeMeme and get $50 off. But I still prefer AN Hosting (use the code FUTUROSITY and get 3 free months).
Well for what its worth, I was (still am) using HostRocket. I would compare them to your experience with Dreamhost overall. I have been with them since 2002, and for whatever reason, have not decided to leave yet. They are down frequently, and admit to being down, have issues with server’s being VERY out of date, etc. The list goes on and one however, maybe I will switch over to your AN Hosting with your code.
Its funny because I too wanted to go over to MT but after reading this, and some of the feedback you got from them, forget it!
Steve, try AN Hosting. They’re the best of the shared hosts, at least in my experience. Use code FUTUROSITY for 3 free months. It’s a good deal.
Robert, do you have a preference between MidPhase and AN Hosting since they are owned by the same company? It seems like hold times are a bit less with MP than AN, but maybe I’ve just been lucky.
I have had my share of problems with MT since they forced me to move off a shared server to the grid server. In my experience, their customer service is generally lacking in that while technically competent, many of their techs do not seem to understand that support is a customer service oriented job. They are particularly adept at pushing blame off to third party software when the problems are frequently their own. I’ve encountered this with both the Grid and DV services.
If I have a problem with Plesk, MT says I have to contact Plesk. If MT tells me to do something that is wrong, they push it back on me by saying that they did not tell me what to do, but rather merely provided a suggestion.
I called MidPhase today, and with their dedicated hosting, they actually offer a paid service wherein if I have problems with setting up a domain or blog correctly, they will actually do it for me. I am a designer and writer, and I am admittedly challenged when it comes to setting up server stuff, so this offering is of particular significance for me. And– it is the polar opposite of what MT’s finger-pointing policy.
Like you experienced, I’m paying a premium with MT, so the service should reflect that. It just doesn’t though.
Thanks a ton for this article and to everyone who chimed in as well. I am going to give AN a try and will take advantage of the ThemeMeme code.
Kelly, MidPhase and AN Hosting are both owned by the same company and, as far as I know, share the same support and infrastructure. Hold times shouldn’t really be different calling either company. I generally recommend AN Hosting because the packages are more generous. You’re basically getting a better deal for essentially the same service.
Your experience with MT sounds similar to mine. They’re overpriced and their customer service tends to play the blame game and to try to upsell you to a more expensive service as a solution to problems you shouldn’t be having on the service level you have.
Most people buy more hosting than they need. Try AN Hosting. Use code FUTUROSITY for 3 free months.
I forgot to mention that the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when MT’s support told me that they do not guarantee an support at all with their $50/mo. DV packages. When I asked what that meant, the tech said simply, “You are buying reserved space on a server, that’s it, nothing more.”
I think the way he said it may have been a bit over-simplified, but it perfectly illustrated MT’s attitude towards the customer.
Kelly, that’s classic. MT doesn’t really have a customer service focus. They’re just too cool.
Kelly:
Oh, that is rich. I’ve received a credit from MT because one of their Tier 1 support (glorified phone operators) took it upon himself to set up firewall rules when he saw that a possible DDOS attack was causing slow down on my $50/mth DV. He managed to block ALL web traffic to my sites. I complained that there was NO authorization on my part to do such a thing, and they acknowledged that those are supposed to be self-managed accounts.
Vent @mediatemple on Twitter, publicly, when you have a real problem, of which I’ve had quite a few this summer.
I’m looking at using dnsmadeeasy.com with their site monitoring DNS management tools. Those will failover to another server if a site goes down. I’ll start migrating some sites off MT and onto SliceHost, where I’ll have to learn to manage things myself, with failover temporary pages on my MT server. I have one site on MT that I’ve gone to great lengths to set up the server for, so that’s not going anywhere.
I currently have 2 DVs at MT. By ditching one and setting up one at SliceHost, even paying for dnsmadeeasy, I’ll be saving money each month.
Mark
I have owned dozens of websites since 1994 and consult on several more. I currently maintain accounts at
Lunarpages – dedicated and shared
BlueHost
DreamHost
MediaTemple
AN Hosting
HostICan
I have had problems with all of the ones I use most often, at one time or another. I am most used to Lunarpages which is why my dedicated server is with them.
In all cases I have found that support people who are knowledgeable make life worth living. Life can be hell if you get someone who doesn’t know the answer to your question, or worse, guesses/makes something up. I think that is why you see a wide variety of comments about different companies. I am currently running into that with support at MediaTemple – it’s a client site and they don’t want to move so I’m stuck trying to be civil with support people who send me links to irrelevant articles rather than answering my queries (latest – I keep getting corrupt backups in tgz format – support sends me a link to decompression utilities from the 90s. I had to explain to him that Macs have been using OSX and Intel for several years, and that I decompress tar and tgz files every day.) But I have also had decent support responses from MT so I spin the roulette wheel and hope I get one of them again.
I do agree that AN Hosting seems very responsive – maybe I’ll transfer a heavier site there and really put them through the paces.
It’s true. A lot of it is just the luck of the draw. But overall, I’ve been very satisfied with AN Hosting.
I recently switched to Media Temple from Dreamhost. For a while I was very happy. Uploading images for WordPress posts and writing/saving posts was somehow even faster on Media Temple than on my local WordPress installation.
Lately however Media Temple is rendering my pages either slowly or not at all. The problem is intermittent. It seems like the problem is caused by MySQL outages. During outages static files like HTML and images get served fast, but any page that requires MySQL hangs.
Note that I have less than 1,000 pageviews a day and I use the WP_Cache plugin, so it’s not me taxing the database.
Almost all of the problems I had with MT were database related. Their answer was always to upgrade my service and pay more!
The thing with MediaTemple remains an open mystery to us right now — we’ve never been able to reproduce it, but it obviously affects people. Our only theory is that it has something to do with MediaTemple limiting the number of concurrent FTP connections, but not really telling us this.
That said, there is a workaround! Use SFTP. Then Coda and MediaTemple get along fine.
Fun! :)
Hey, Cabel, thanks very much for that tip! I’m not with MT anymore, but that sounds like a good workaround.
BTW, I highly recommend Coda.
@CABEL SASSER
Thanks for the tip on using Coda and Media Temple together via sftp. Works a treat for me thanks!!!
You got in there before me on that one Cabel, i was just about to drop the sftp/coda trick, which surpringly enough (mt) told me about when coda kept dropping me out.
I too have been through my share of hosts and with after many problems, and with the uptime guarentee and top spec data centres i choose (mt).
I chose a gs service and host around 10 wordpres sites each with around 400-1000 hits a day.
Big mistake ! Problems so far include (these are just the highlights)
- being shoved onto an emergancy ‘burst’ SQL container for 7 days due to excessive SQL traffic (sorry (mt) i was developing a site and testing it, surely that is not excessive, …consequence : when they moved me back they accidently 0′ed one filed in one db table in ALL of my wordpress databases, ..which filed, …the oe that links posts to categories !! (slightly important) :)
…what did they say, ..well they denied it, emphatically, after i spent 4-5 hours uncovering the problem myself i restored all backups (mine, not theirs, ..they wanted to charge me for theirs for $250!!) ..and all this with 10 sites down or dysfunctional in key critical business hours.
..ok, i will not go on with more, ..but i will say this whilst sitting on the fence: They completely underestimated the resources required by the SQL aspect of their grid service and simply did not have the hardware resoucres in place to deal with it, ..they have since been making improvements to this which have been helping greatly.
Sites are still slow, (even if it has made me come on leap and bounds in optimizing and improving WP sites performance :) ) ..but things are getting better.
Will i be moving, ….i worked it out, …it cost me in time/effort/self esteem and everything else around $1000 to migrate all of those sites from one host to another, ..and (mt)will not facilitate migrating an account from one gs acount to a dv ….so what’s left, ..well to appease the angry clients i purchased their SQL containers (as much as it pained me to do so), the $20 one made no difference, the $70 one worked wonders, ..or maybe that was me and the WP optimization again.
Will i use them again, ..well i mirror the sentiments by so many in terms of support, ..luck of the drawer, …but my luck seems to be better with them than many i have experienced in the past, …as for service, ..well i have had far far worse exerieces with the others, big names like 1and1 included, …and then there are the factors outside their control where it doesn’t matter how amazing a host is (media72), if THEIR host (data centers) suddenly blow up!, the sites still go down.
My summary, ..until they pluck out my still beating heart and dance on it (thanks 1and1 for that experience) i say ‘better the devil you know…’
..and that logo is oh so cool :)
Just wanted to chime in and mention that although (mt)’s DV hosting packages are worlds above the Grid plans, there are certain things you willingly sacrifice when making the switch. One sacrifice is acknowledging that fact that a DV plans assumes that you understand the basics of server administration. <a href=”http://5thirtyone.com/archives/757″Migration from a Grid hosting plan to a DV plan isn’t difficult though.
Sometimes I find myself scratching my head when it comes to DV tasks but the kB has some pretty thorough articles to get you through the fog.
I would never recommend hosting multiple clients on the Grid. If you are offering hosting as part of your projects, go with a virtual server.
We use mt for our reseller hosting. I don’t know what their level of support is like for their other hosting solutions but with a dv it’s really good. Ive never had a response time that’s been over a day – and critical server issues are resolved in a matter of minutes.
That and the cost of a dedicated server is really cheap considering.
Thanks for this, Robert.
I hear only good things about AN Hosting.
I’m about to move host (I currently use Freehostia: fine, considering it cost me $36 for a year, but not what I need now). I was also considering MT because a few high profile sites were using it.
What originally put me off was the copy on their website: it was full of jargon and didn’t list what they actually provided. They have at least improved in that respect, but reading the above…
Robert -
I came upon this thread while researching hosts; it’s been enormously helpful.
I have some small WP blogs and e-commerce sites, and have been swaying between MT, AN, Bluehost & HostGator. It’s so interesting to read the wide range of opinions on every host – how can people swear by the same host that other people are destroying?
Anyway, the fact that both you and Chris Pearson swear by AN is pretty compelling.
Is your FUTUROSITY code at AN still good for 3 free months? I just plugged it in and got a “not valid / expired” message.
Thanks for all the great info.
I’ve been with (mt) for just over 2 years. I signed up the same month as the (gs) release and have had very few problems while other have had problems like yours. The (gs) is designed in such a way that there are several clusters and each cluster has several of it’s own storage segments. Then there are dedicated server for the MySQL which is why you can’t use ‘localhost’ on the (gs). In short, it’s easy to see why one cluster can be having problems while other clusters remain untouched. Cluster 2 has had far more problems then others.
As Media Temple adds more clusters with improvements they continue to improve. Everyone I have heard from on the latest clusters have had little to no problems.
Their (dv) are rock solid and I don’t know anyone who has had problems with them. The only reason a (dv) will go down is because of the customer not (mt). Except for the obvious limitations of resources but that’s the same for every VPS host.
I realize that this article is dusty, but it’s still just as true today — maybe more so. I work for a Web 2.0 company with a corporate blog. To reduce overhead, they decided to outsource a lot of internal services, such as email (Google Apps) and our blog (WP on MediaTemple). Supposedly, MT can handle huge spikes in load such as the Slashdot or Digg effect. In our experience, it’s performance has consistently been equal to or lesser than(!) a dedicated Pentium-1 CPU(!!!).
If I hadn’t setup some rather involved caching magic, the blog wouldn’t even be available in any practical sense for about 90% of the time. Here’s an example. On a dedicated P3 server I setup for a nonprofit:
Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.182 seconds
MediaTemple Grid service:
Dynamic Page Served (once) in 43.781 seconds
Almost 44 seconds! That’s simply incredible to me. Needless to say, I’m moving our blog back over to the corporate network. If MediaTemple can’t even handle a normal workday load, how can they handle a Digg? I’m posting here to save somebody else from falling for the hype and wasting their time and money with a worthless host.
Hey Robert,
I searched Google if anyone things that MT sucks. :) and i found you.
I also think that MT sucks. Lemmi say why. 4 days ago I have applied for a Grid Service and for a domain name. But they have send me email that my credit card has an error (actually their system has error, my card works everywhere). I have talked with support guy, he said me that it is inpossible to buy anything with my card. Anyways, i went and bought a hosting and domain name grom godaddy.com . after 10 minutes it works! it is online now http://www.mahirzeynalov.com. But after 2 days i have shocked when i checked my mailbox. Funcking MT sent me an email that they bought for me mahirzeynalov.com and activated Grid service! can u imagine?! :D they have charged me for already registered domain. Plus, i have said to support guy that i have talked that i sadly, must buy a hosting domain from another company and he said ok. :)
I have wrote them, it is 2 days, and they yet didnt answered me, and still they spend my money and buy a 150$ jean with my money. FUCK!
No the (gs) is not unreliable. Yes some parts of the first two clusters still experience some problems, but Media Temple has fixed most of them. It’s sad that a few outspoken idiots can influence others into believing (mt)’s sucks. They have problems like any other host, but they provide excellent service and support, they are very professional and they always try to make things right with the customers which is why I stay loyal to them. Not to mention their (dv)’s are rock solid.
Man I am sooo sick of Media Temple I can’t tell you guys. I moved to Media Temple’s GS from 1and1 shared hosting thinking MediaTemple’s supposedly “grid service” and have a ripple effect on the cluster servers in case I get high traffic and the single server will not get bogged down.
I get about 10,000 unique according to Stat Counter.
But today my site was down for 5 HRS! because media temple decided to move my database to some container to enable scaling.
I am so sick of these guys really.
I think it is fair of me to chime back in on this thread after giving AN Hosting more than a fair try and having an absolutely awful experience.
I’d say avoid for AN/Midphase. They do not offer customer-oriented service at all, their support is downright terrible, and their sales team makes empty promises which are later refuted by billing.
I’ve switched back to MediaTemple. Between the two of them, I have to say that MediaTemple comes out head and shoulders above AN.
My experience with AN went like this:
I called to ask many questions before signing up. Primary among them was about their 1-year payment due up front policy. The sales person told me, “Our standard refund policy if you are unhappy with our service is 30 days, but honestly, if you’re unhappy beyond that, we make exceptions all the time and will be happy to provide a prorated refund if you request it.”
That sounded fair, so I signed up with AN Hosting. Got two welcome emails, one from AN and one from Midphase, with conflicting login information. Called support to find out which was correct, sat on hold for 20 minutes, figured it out. Customer service told me that all accounts were really Midphase, and that AN was just a brand name, which after signup had no actual relevance.
AN had told me they could transfer my site files with no problems. It took them four days and several emails to complete this. Turns out that their support is in the Ukraine, so anything beyond basic takes at least a 24-48 hours turnaround for an answer. (Their answers often do not address the original problem at all.) They changed the name of my site’s database without my permission. We had to go through the site with a fine-tooth comb making fixes all over the place.
Their 1-click install for Wordpress did not work. Not just once, but every time. Repeated support calls would get the problem corrected in 48 hours.
Nearly all support calls were answered by inexperienced techs who were more interested in arguing than in problem-solving. On one call, a tech manager gave me his direct line and told me to call him directly with any support calls from there on out. Sounded good to me, but there was just one problem: He never answered his phone. Not once.
I really tried to give AN a fair shake. It took more than the first 30 days to work through all of the various trials and tribulations with their support being out of the Ukraine. After about 45 days, I requested a prorated refund. Billing told me, “No, our refund policy is 30 days. We will not provide any refunds after that.”
I called back sales to verify what I had been told originally, that AN would provide a prorated refund if I was unhappy even after the first 30 days. I asked about new service, asked about the policy, and was told the exact same thing – that they would provide the prorated refund even after the first 30 days were over. I asked about 60 days, and the salesman said, “Yes, even after 2 or 3 months, we would still do it.”
Still, Billing would not budge, and no refund came.
So, I decided to not fight it and see if I could utilize the hosting service I had already paid for since AN/Midphase went back on their word. I tried to log in, and guess what? They had blocked me from my own account. I requested support so that I could log in, and I never heard back. Finally, I got a renewal bill from them two days ago!
In conclusion: I paid for one year of service, and I got about 45 days of flawed hosting, arguing, inadequate support, what seems like a blatant lie by sales, and a testy billing department that does not back up their sales team’s promises.
Honestly, of all of the hosting companies I have used since 1997, AN Hosting has been the worst one.
I went back to MediaTemple when all of the problems with AN first started. I told them about the experience of trying to switch hosts, and that I now have a much better appreciation for their service, which they actually seemed to appreciate hearing.
I have found that MT’s support is pretty stellar during the week. MT’s weekend shift can often be confrontational and frustrating, so I avoid calling support on the weekends. Other than that, MediaTemple has proven to be the clear winner over AN.
One other note about AN versus MT: One day, someone on the shared server at AN was sending out a mass spam. It slowed down my site’s page load times to 30-seconds each. I called tech support, who discovered the problem and got to work on shutting down the spammer’s service. But it took all day, and my page load speeds did not correct until the end of the day, about six hours later.
In contrast, since moving back to MT’s Grid Server, I had one day when there was a huge spike in my site traffic. It literally tripled. The cluster burst technology kicked in, bumped my allocation up, and nothing slowed down, not even a little bit. The next day, my site traffic went back down to normal, and MT’s system reduced my server allocation to normal, all seamless, at no extra charge.
I agree! MT sucks! They took money from my account to transfer a domain name, which failed and subsequently expired. 2 weeks later, still waiting for an explanation…I had to re-register with another company. Still waiting for my money back. Also, the UI does not work on mac os x 10.4 in firefox or safari, their bug reporter is buggy…
Zach Wingo you must be one of the few people who is not affected by the crap service that Media Temple offers. Sure it is one thing to have real life problems and deal with them, I mean we all need to be forgiving. But freaking Media Temple always responds to my site support requests by pointing the finger at my site. I have a much more complicated theme with 15 plugins on HostGator and that site performs without a hitch. My simple surfing site for Costa Rica is a basic wordpress theme with 3 plugins, how can this cause so many issues? Media Temple does suck but not because I cannot forgive them but because they promise great service, reliable uptime and they do not even come close. Furthermore, there is nothing worse in my book than blaming the customer for your own problems. I am screwed because my business grew fast and I chose to send all of my clients to Media Temple and now I am trying to consolidate all of my accounts and move them to gogrid or mosso and swallow the large monthly fee so I do not have to field questions from my clients why their site is not online. Screw you Media Temple and your Oprah sales pitch
Can anyone verify MT’s UI on OS X 10.4?
FWIW, currently using bluehost with no issues. Live chat responses are prompt. Typically within minutes if before 3PM.
I pay 150 or more for a jeans too, and I’m a webdesigner, (rails-& php-) developer.
You just won’t find a bargain jeans with a 13 ounce quality japenese denim which doesn’t look like crap and wears so too.
Ab and i avoid good visible signs of any brand on my clothes, just to adress this stereotype …
The amount of downtime I receive from mediatemple, is absurd. I feel like every weekend my site goes down, sometimes only for a few minutes, but other times for more than a few hours..
I have been using MediaTemple for a few years and have never had any problems. Even when having to use support, I have received timely responses. When I had a domain transfer fail (not even sure why yet) they promptly credited my account the free as I had requested.
With any shared hosting, no matter what they call it, you are going to run into hiccups – and it depends what other sites are being hosted on the same servers/grids/clusters whatever. Same with shared mysql databases – it only takes a few high usage ones to make the smaller ones run more slow.
I don’t let the little things bug me.. If I need 100% uptime I’m going to invest a heck of a lot more money into something more serious than shared hosting.
I left mediatemple a few months back. I noticed some nodes are faster than others, and mine sucked! It’s like my friend’s nodes were on a whole different network. My friends were completely satisified, but I wasn’t! It would take forever to load up a simple damnned wordpress site. Currently using these guys here. They seem to be a small company. Very local, but the service is super fast.
I wish I had done a search for “media temple sucks” before I signed up for their service. It’s now over a year since this article was written and I can firmly say that their service and response times still suck.
I had my own dedicated server for 4 years at The Planet and had very few problems. I used to complain about their tech support but they were exceptional compared to (mt).
All the problems mentioned in the article and in the comments are still happening. We have constant downtime. They don’t give any refunds or guarantees when their service goes down. Which is almost daily.
If you’ve bought into the hype and are thinking about signing up, don’t. It’s not worth it at all. I spent a month moving all my sites to them because they’re too incompetent to even set up a script to interface with cPanel to grab sites even with root access.
Now that I’m here, I’m stuck for now because I can’t invest the time to move the sites for a while. The gs sounds great but it’s probably the king of failed promises. No downtime? What a joke.
On top of that their sales guy said with confidence that I could host 100 sites on one package. 100 sites as long as you don’t need SSL for anything. If you want to install a certificate on more than one site, you will need to sign up for a new service for each site. Seems like something they should be mentioning to their prospective clients before signing up. I unfortunately only found out after I had moved several of my sites over.
Media Temple doesn’t seem to be doing anything about this uptime issue and their 20 hour turnaround for a ticket is a huge joke. I can’t believe they have the nerve to write that customer support is their biggest focus. Maybe it should be uptime. But then again, they’re not getting that right either.
I have sent two e-mails to their feedback e-mail and have received nothing back both times. Not a thank you for letting them know about problems. Not a sorry. Not a refund.
Media Temple truly does suck. It sucks big time. But hey, at least they are good enough to update me about their enormous staff party on their Twitter account.
My Google Apps mail account was down for half a day recently. Google credited 3 days worth of service to our account because of it. That’s called accountability. Mediatemple? Need I say more?
I just moved off of MediaTemple to A Small Orange and talk about an instant speed increase. Once the nameservers took effect and I got my wp-config.php file uploaded (I was having some issues with a 66MB SQL file), my site was running perfectly. I just gotta set up Mint and that is it. ^_^;;
I thought i was the only one with problems with “cool” Media Temple. In my case, it was errr… funny. everything was going ok when they released Grid server; i didn’t updated so i kept with the so called GS Lite. When i decided to update to the bigger GS, everything became worse… lots of spam… slow websites (really small ones!), trusted mails not arriving (because MT thought it was spam), and so on. The support tickets usually got an answer 2 days later.
I’m using another provider called Servage; it’s small, but i’ve never had any problem, it’s cheap, support is really nice, and it’s not overcrowded (what i think is the MT’s real problem)
César
After 6 years with mt (yes, 6), here’s my farewell to their “resolved” post:
I am sorry, but this is simply not true. Or connecting 5 minutes to your mailserver is what you would call resolved? I know you will remove this message from here and contact me to offer some 6 months of free hosting, but don’t try it. Please. I was hosting my website on MT for I think 6 years, but it is time to close the deal.
I was good customer, I paid all my bills, I referred some people to you and what I’ve got in return? An unreliable service with more troubles and issues than Soviet spaceship? No thanks. I need my emails to work, I need my website to work or otherwise it is a waste of money and you wasted a lot of my money.
If anyone wants to know how Media Temple’s service is just go to their website http://mediatemple.net and check the system status. It’s going on day 2 with no email for all my clients. Unreal.
How Media Temple’s (gs) page should read: http://richpollock.com/therealmt
That’s great! Very funny!
I’m another long-term, loyal MT customer looking to vent frustration and quickly escape. The hosting service really sucks. We have optimised everything on our site, got Zend running, static caches etc, but over 2.000 visits a day MT fall over, drop DB connections… We’re well within their stated resource limits – and I’ve even asked how we can make use of the ‘burstability’ – I even said what can we pay you to keep our site running… support pointed that the problem is a few missing images on the homepage!
We’ve asked them to tell us what resource limits we’re hitting but get no answer.
We have 7 grid-servers, with MySQl containers and the whole shooting match. We’ll be moving the lot as soon as we possibly can. This is beyond a joke now!
We have had unbelievable problems with MediaTemple since day one and we are only into it for 2 weeks now. System outages, grid outages, storage outages, and our sites are taking a beating! STAY AWAY FROM MEDIA TEMPLE! I’m about to pull an all night looking for a solution before my clients kill me!
very good point. We are having trouble with bluehost right now because we installed a mailer srcript (omnistar) that causes cpu peaks. Bluehost was too fast up the soap box in calling a warning. I am wondering as to whether media temples dv plan is any good?
christian
Much as D’s comment, above. I’ve been with MT for 3 weeks and I’ve now had 40+ hours of actual downtime on Grid 2 (the one that’s full of shit, and the one that you will get if you now join MT — because Grid 1 hasn’t had remaining capacity for years). Here’s the story:
1. Last week, major downtime (8+ hours) with no reason. And they could help me when I contacted them to tell them I was affected by this Grid 2 issue! They should have bloody known who it affected, and sorted it out before I got irate!
2. Day before yesterday, Grid 2 was subjected to a security breach. A hacker hacked my wordpress blog. And many other people’s blogs, and sites. They refreshed my site, but I cannot allow it to go back online until I’ve secured it fully — because clearly MT is unable to do so. However, I put in a support request 24 hours ago to ask them what the nature of the breach was, so that I am able to set up my own security measures. This morning, 24 hours later, I still see “Your request will be responded to in approximately 20 hours”.
It’s the last straw, I’ve got no interest in using MT, even though I would have upgraded to their better offerings (DV etc.) once my site takes off.