November 3, 2008
under: other  |  2 Comments

Goodbye, MediaTemple. I wish you would have worked.

There was a perfect storm this weekend between Media Temple’s gridservice repeatedly failing and Dreamhost offering a special deal for their 11th birthday. I am switching hosting providers. If Dreamhost proves no more reliable than Media Temple, I will at least be paying half as much for it. It’s too bad that Media Temple fumbled the repeated outages. Apparently, they’ve been going on for some time.

Points of failure: 1) A former professor who I’ve asked to write a recommendation for me was unable to access my sites and see my work. I thought this was strange, since I hadn’t heard anything about my hosting being compromised.

2) HTTP access to my sites failed completely for three separate 15-minute blocks of time today. I noticed because I’ve been developing a personal project (which I will document here once I’ve migrated and completed the project). This obviously led to frustration and also caused some unnecessary debugging time on my end.

3) MediaTemple never said a thing about the failures. After I opened a support request, a Media Temple representative responded with a short email. They claimed the issues had been fixed (they had not), and that they were due to problems with the database server. I question their placement of blame, as I was able to run my application locally while accessing the online databases even when HTTP access to my server failed.

I was about ready to forgive and forget until the third and fourth failures today. It’s too bad there doesn’t seem to be an option out there that just works. Then again, I haven’t even begun to run on Dreamhost yet. Don’t be surprised if things are a bit wonky over the next week or two. That will either be due to MediaTemple passing the buck or crazy DNS reassignments I barely comprehend.

Comments:

  1. November 3, 2008

    lenny wrote:

    we’re moving to dreamhost right now. things can only get better.

    we left them alone with their slick interface. i wonder if there’s anybody left to push their buttons. can’t believe they’re having those issues over that timeframe, must be breakin their backbones.

    i didn’t event try to open a supportticket, estimated time for a response was labeled with more than 24hrs, wtf..
    well, if i was them i wouldn’t pick up the phone too…

  2. November 6, 2008

    admin wrote:

    Some responses to this on Facebook confirmed that the switch was the right move. Media Temple is designed to be used by people who pay large bills, and ignores the everyday user. Dreamhost, while probably not perfect, is aimed at normal people and takes care of them.

    I’m very happy with Dreamhost so far. Some minor hiccups in the transition, but they’ve been responsive and helpful. Should be fully online across all my sites soon.

    Also, the built-in svn panel should be awesome to take advantage of. Especially with the unlimited data.

    I hope it works well for you guys, too.