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 Futurosity 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). (Shameless plug: If you use my FUTUROSITY promo code you’ll get three months free).
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, use the code Futurosity for $50 off).
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, use the promo code FUTUROSITY and get 3 free months!
If you liked this post, why not subscribe to Futurosity?
Looking for a host that doesn’t suck? Get great hosting, save money, and support Futurosity. Use code FUTUROSITY for 3 free months!
30 Comments
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 Futurosity 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 Futurosity and get $50 off. But I still prefer AN Hosting (use the code FUTUROSITY and get 3 free months).