I have been through a ton of different web hosts since 1997. Over the past 4 years though, I’ve stuck with one company, Media Temple. I know there are a lot of cheaply priced hosting plans out there, but for me, I would rather pay a little bit more knowing I’m with a company I can trust and treats me right. Whenever I would call for an issue, there is somebody ready to pick up the phone right away…and actually knows what they are talking about.

Sometime in the past year or so Media Temple changed their whole shared server system into something called Grid-server. I won’t go into details as you can just read that link, but on paper it’s pretty cool. It had a cool new administration interface, and it was supposed to be Digg capable. People from Digg even posted trying to take down a site, and it seemed to manage ok.

So I thought I would migrate my server for ActiveTuning over to the GS from their old shared server platform. Everything migrated smoothly and quickly, I just had to change a couple config files to match the new system paths and what not. I was happy. Now I have all of my sites hosted through Media Temple, and a couple clients from Tri Megatech as well.

The problem is over the past few months, I’ve had all sorts of issues with e-mail and even worse, downtime. You may have noticed two days ago, any of my main MT hosted sites were down a bunch of times (ActiveTuning, Tri Megatech, VideoExperiment, and this site). This is a major issue for me especially for ActiveTuning because all of our sales are done through our website. When our website is down, business is closed. Even this website, which I’m trying to increase the readership suffered because my Viper with a matching helicopter article was posted on Autoblog, but I lost a lot of the readers due to downtime.

Yesterdays issue was apparently due to the configuration of the BlueArc storage segment, and affected web, e-mail, and FTP…everything you need to run a website. I’m not positive, but I believe one of the previous downtime issues was due to the same problem.

Speaking of issues, I’m trying to login to my account center, and it seems like their account center site is down right now! Ok, now that it’s back up, I can pull some of my support tickets. I had issues with downtime on 2/22 and 12/3, and I recall these were both fairly long before they were resolved. I also had e-mail issues with Tri Megatech where some would come in and some would not. That seems to be resolved now, even though the solution that could not be resolved according to MT was an ISP blocking issue:

(mt) Media Temple has made numerous attempts to contact Comcast Cable and AT&T in attempts to be delisted from their “blocklist”. However, both parties are refusing to communicate with us or are ignoring us. At this point and time, (mt) Media Temple has no way of resolving this issue and has no control over the mail servers that are blocking mail from our servers. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused. Thank you for your understanding.

I know it seems like I’m bad mouthing Media Temple, and I do admit, in the past few months there have been way too many issues. It all seems to be from this new Grid-Server setup. It does look like it has been getting better with each version upgrade they do…but it’s to the point now where I can’t even recommend my clients to do hosting through MT because of the downtime. There was one point where I was on location for a client showing them a prototype design that was hosted on our MT served site, and it was down. I obviously could not sell them a hosting plan after that.

I think that I probably have one or two more chances with MT having issues before enough is enough. I truly hope they are not outgrowing themselves. If you are hosted through Media Temple, how have your experiences been?