Media Temple Review

This article will be brief – and uncharacteristically NOT about project management software or running your company – sort of. This post is for you business owners out there wondering about hosting.

It’s my philosophy that as a business, no matter what your size, your “employer” is your client or in the case of Zincubate… my audience. I rely on you to come to the site, like the content, comment, etc. in order to gain revenue through advertising and affiliate marketing.

In other businesses your “employed” by the customers that purchase your products. You have a duty to them to provide the best product, service, and support you can. Your employees and your vendors help that happen. I have a whole body-like metaphor, but I’ll save that for another time.

Anyway, in another world, I run a small web development company. We’ve been through dozens of “hosting” companies throughout the years, before finally settling on Rackspace. Rackspace rocks. Unfortunately, they’re ridiculously expensive, and cost prohibitive, if you just have a small blog. They’re making inroads via their Cloud service to lowering that cost, but even then it’s a service for small-medium web companies looking to divvy space to clients.

I was looking for, simple, shared hosting for promana.net. After receiving a ton of traffic on WordPress, I decided to setup a company, purchase my own hosting, and go full force into this side passion of mine – helping small business utilize the Internet and web technologies to grow. After some research I chose MediaTemple.

Media Temple has been a main player in the web space for sometime. They’ve sponsored many events I’ve attended and have a cool look and great salesmanship (a nicely designed website). Unfortunately, I was nearly immediately confronted with the harsh reality upon signing up for their service.

MEDIA TEMPLE IS EXPENSIVE!

But I don’t really care…

Quick disclaimer here – MediaTemple is probably one of the most expensive services out there. Being in the industry I understand the value of hosting, and didn’t want to choose the cheapest service as in the past that has led to huge problems. I incorrectly choose MediaTemple based on price (although in this case it was for the opposite reason – I thought the high price was indicative of quality).

MEDIA TEMPLE KEPT GOING DOWN

As other people throughout the net have stated… MediaTemple used to publish uptimes and guarantees. That no longer seems to be the case. In the 9 months since launching, all of my sites were completely down for a day more than once. In fact, even yesterday there was a small outage, leading to a few minutes of downtime. I’m not usually a stickler for this, but:

1. search engines don’t care about infrastructure problems – your site has to be 100% up!
2. users could care less – if your site isn’t showing, it’s a horrible sign
3. I have tons of real time and money invested in the site, ever moment it’s not up is a lost opportunity

I’ve read a few accounts on MediaTemple’s lack luster up times and some seem to attribute it to the company’s unique infrastructure. When one node goes down everything crashes. That seemed to be the case for me.

Additionally, and perhaps more alarmingly – there were just too many weird problems that I attributed to a poor host. FTP connections would be routinely dropped or unavailable… completely unacceptable when launching site updates and after upgrades on WP for this and a few other hosted blogs totally failed, I really got concerned.

MEDIA TEMPLE’S SUPPORT WAS PRETTY BAD

I’ve worked with the support at about 20 or so different hosts, from GoDaddy to Host Gator, Dream Host to Rackspace. Rackspace is the gold standard. Even if the problem has nothing to do with their service, they try to help. They’ll even assist with coding! But they charge appropriately and I didn’t need anything like that for this simple blog…

However, every/any support issues I had were not answered promptly, nearly 24 hours before I got any kind of response, and often the response was just passing the ball back into my court.

In conclusion (now this is feeling like a grade school paper) I can not recommend MediaTemple at all. There interface looks cool on their site, but is deplorable, and mostly useless. They greatly limit databases which for the price of their hosting is crazy, their support sucks, and most importantly, their service just kept failing. Perhaps in time MediaTemple will turn back around, but I have a feeling if and when that happens – Rackspace will have taken over the world.

Also – I’m trying out Page.ly now for Zincubate, as they have a completely wordpress tailored solution with security enhancements. The experience has been different so far, but after a single question during setup was answered in 11 minutes on a Sunday, I’m already very happy with the service. Review coming soon.

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