If you’re looking for a server to host your website, I suggest looking at companies other than MediaTemple.
For the past several months, I’ve had nothing but problems with their grid-servers and this weekend was the last straw. Doobybrain.com was down for more than 10 hours and went in and out for another several more hours after it did finally come back online. The downtime at MT is simply unacceptable and while I know that it’s impossible to have 100% uptime, the amount of downtime at the company is getting significantly worse every month.
My contract/plan with MediaTemple ends in May and come that time, I will definitely be ending my service with them. I am simply fed up with their service.
But take my advice: Do not get hosting from MediaTemple and do not be fooled by MediaTemple’s fancy looks and buttons. It’s all part of their image of being a professional host, which they clearly are not.
UPDATE (March 4, 2009): My words were harsh at the original time that this post went live and for good reason. I was not happy with whatever was going on at MediaTemple and the lack of clear communication from the company about the situation/downtime. With that said, I retract my statement about MT being unprofessional. A member of their team got in contact with me and has reassured me of my faith in their service by showing me that their #1 priority really is customer satisfaction and that the company is doing everything that it can to make sure this doesn’t ever happen again.
My decision to leave the company is still up in the air at the moment, but if MT can keep my site up in the next two months without any major problems, I think Alex might very well have saved at least one customer from a switch.
A friend runs this:
http://www.monochrome.net
hoho knows him too.
our friend ewie stopped hosting the service in november. sorry.
We (my company) use mediatemple from 2007 and we never had problem of downtime…i think in 2 years we’ve got like 2 hours of downtime…
the lucky thing is that we work in Italy so if there is some downtime in the day in US for us is fully night and we wont see “problems” impacting on our web servers…
I completely agree, Mediatemple sucks big time. Their grid server is a big joke and so is their support. All you get is canned replies after 5 – 6 hours. Plus I could never understand the charges levied for extra GPU cycles.
How’s Media Templte these days? We are considering switching to them. They seem to have an awesome package w/ 100 domains and 1000 email accounts for just $20. Our current host is great but we get a fraction of the storage and none of the multiple domains, large amounts of email accounts, etc.
I’ve read dreadful things about their downtime … is that still the case?
Josh,
Get ready to enter Satins bedroom. Media Temple is by far the shittiest host on the block. Most of there low end and medium range services are horrible.
My email has been down for 2 day’s now we run a highly profitable GPS tracking company http://www.trackstick.com
This is unacceptable by all means, switching clusters in the middle of the day? Websites and email services offline.
Shame on you media temple, you had us and now you lost us.
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. ^_^;;
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We attempted to transfer from GoDaddy to (mt) and thus far its just resulted in our website being down for almost two days. (mt) seems unable to send us the authorization email required for us to complete the transfer. Its horrible service thus far.
it really sounds like some people in this forum don’t know how to setup swaps from one host to media temple. i get sites up and running on MT within minutes of moving my files over. installing wordpress is a breeze. managing my databases is super easy. i mean occassionally i get a notice that gridservice will be down for maintenance but rarely see any downtime. when I have seen downtime its been for less than 20 minutes.
their customer support is pretty on point, the speed is nice, otherwise I wouldnt be able to run one of my other 3D sites on their service, which has a HUGE database, but runs super smooth.
i suggest readingt their knowledgebase and walk in optomisitc. threads like this can really sour people, especially when contributors may not necessarily be doing things correclty.
I tried Mediatemple gridserver twice, in 2007 and again in 2008. Once for a personal site, and another for the company I worked for. I really wanted to like this company, with their trendy image and their hyped technology. Needless to say, reading your post did not surprise me at all. In my experience, the gridserver concept was a neat selling point, but it is extremely unreliable. In each case, the servers were down sometimes for days at a time; it was one problem after the next. After a decade of using other hosting providers, I have never used a host with so many ongoing issues with database servers, storage grids, power problems, DNS problems, extreme latency, etc etc.
To be fair, when I closed my personal account, they refunded my money. Their customer service people seem nice and reasonable, but when it comes to using something that works, give me a regular ol’ shared hosting box over the Gridserver any day.