Welcome!

[pvliii]

Does anyone have any experience with Media Temple (www.mediatemple.net), specifically their Grid-Service? How do they rate as far as speed? I'm moving from BlueHost (www.bluehost.com) after several years because of slow page loads. I like the idea of grid based hosting over the shared hosting offered by BlueHost.

Any thoughts?

[Jared]

I've been on the grid service for a year and a half with mixed feelings.

The first year I was with them I had no issues. Lately however, things have really gotten bad. All my sites that use a SQL database crawl. Take anywhere from 10-20 seconds to load up the page. It's terrible. The sites are completely unusable.

Until Thanksgiving I was recommending the gs to clients and freinds - but because of my more recent experience I can no longer recommend them - especially if you plan to use a database/CMS powered site.

I am most likely going to be moving off of GS next month. I would look into Dreamhost or A Small Orange, as I've heard those two are decent.

cheers.

[pandora]

I had a huge issue with them a few years ago - on their website, they advertise that they are a great solution for reselling hosting services for your clients, so I signed up with them. But then once you sign up and are allowed to read their user's manual, it tells you (rather explicitly) that they are not the best answer to your reselling needs) because they won't let you have more than one login. Therefore your clients would have to login as you and then browse to their domain's directory from your root directory. A bit asinine, if you ask me.

Again though, this was years ago so I have no idea if this is still true.

[ajcates]

I had a huge issue with them a few years ago - on their website, they advertise that they are a great solution for reselling hosting services for your clients, so I signed up with them. But then once you sign up and are allowed to read their user's manual, it tells you (rather explicitly) that they are not the best answer to your reselling needs) because they won't let you have more than one login. Therefore your clients would have to login as you and then browse to their domain's directory from your root directory. A bit asinine, if you ask me.

Again though, this was years ago so I have no idea if this is still true.

Here I just pulled this from the FAQ at the (mt) site.

Can I Resell Resources on my (gs) Grid-Service?
Yes. However customers serious about reselling should look at our (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server. Although not specifically designed for reselling mass hosting services many designers and developers routinely resell their (gs) Grid-Service space. This solution works well for those designers and developers who typically maintain websites for their clients and only need to provide clients with email, FTP and SSH access to The Grid. Each (gs) Grid-Service comes with one master user account that can access the WebControl panel. You can easily create additional users that have access to email, FTP (including sub-folder FTP restrictions) and SSH resources. However it's not designed to be a traditional mass reseller hosting platform. Therefore it doesn't offer separate control panel access for your clients, separate website statistics for each site hosted on your (gs) Grid-Service or any white label billing and customer support services for your clients. If you are interested in a more robust reseller solution please look into our (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Servers. These solutions will allow you to set resource limits for your clients and provide them with seperate control panel access in addition to many more reseller friendly features.

[hayley]

For a while you couldn't go anywhere without stumbling across a website saying it was hosted by Media Temple but these days I'm hearing mixed reviews. I have a couple of friends who've had your experience with the grid's slowness.

However, I'd say Dreamhost and A Small Orange would have pretty much the same problems. I certainly do with Dreamhost.

To quote what just said in this web hosting thread:

There are a few great web hosts getting a lot of attention for being awesome at the moment, so you could look into these: Fused Network, Clook and LiquidWeb.

[strabley]

I've been using the Mediatemple GS for a while now and can say there is nothing to rave about anymore. Sure, it has an nice admin panel and the click installations of wordpress are nice but the service has been getting more and more spotty recently. I get an email about once a week it seems with some new outage notice.

[twigsnbranches]

A wide-read blogger in Vancouver- miss604.com was a Media Temple user. But her site has been down frequently as of late, so she had to jump ship.

[chrismartens]

I have to agree with everyone here. I had heard great things about (mt) so I signed myself up and ever since then, I can almost schedule in a few hours of downtime every other week or so. Definitely not impressed.

[Adam Sheridan]

It's interesting how many people have had a below average experience with Media Temple but yet it still almost seems like a fashion to let viewers to the website know they are hosted by them...

[Ryan Williams]

Media Temple were really reputable about three years ago, and they also went on an aggressive marketing campaign by sponsoring well-known sites with free hosting — in return for the logo, of course.

It worked, and the company got a great reputation. They became trendy, even. And to be honest they were a good host, but since they introduced this grid nonsense they've gone further and further downhill.

You really do get much better hosting from other high-quality hosts out there (ie: not your Dreamhosts and Hostgators, who might as well be selling 'unlimited' deals like in the 90s).

[Sariff]

I have been using (mt) for about two years now. I currently host two sites and have two more in development. The speed is nothing to rave about, the service is okay. I've been looking at Rackspace as of late. Also (mt) is going to be moving the GS to something new soon. According to thier site its called Cluster-Server

http://mediatemple.net/labs/cs/

-Sariff-

[Phire_SK]

We've been using them for some time now, recommended many clients to them, but now we've switched some of them and don't plan to recommend them anymore.

The problem is their old Grid-Server. After dealing with support (that isn't really helpful until you call them) we finally figured out that they had two sets of GSs. The old one was really bad and the new one was supposed to be better.

Anyway, our company's website is hosted with MT still and even on the new Grid its slow. We're running Expression Engine and that is the problem (not EE but using a CMS or DB driven site).

So, if you're doing a static website with nothing on it, feel free to use them but you're paying a lot for nothing. If you're making a CMS driven website, their GS isn't the best for you, especially at the high price.

They've fallen off and it seems the trend with customers to be leaving them...

[serdar]

I guess anyone would agree that most sites today, need a dynamic structure with database access. So from what I heard GS is useless for most of us. Anyhow, good thing is I won't be jealous of (mt)-hosted sites anymore

[kavoir]

A simple search at WHT would reveal some negative reviews, it's the same with Google results, quite a part of them are negative.

I guess media temple is good at dedicated hosting but their grid service is just below average, more complaints than praises. The grid hosting is soon to be out-fashioned by cloud hosting.

[finalvisual]

had (mt) since 2007, great services & specially the customer services!