In April 2007, I transfered Meandering Passage to Media Temple (MT) based upon the promise of their Grid Service (GS) hosting solution…scaleable and able to spread a load across a wide array of servers and disk units to give reliable hosting.
What I’ve experienced with Media Temple and the Grid Service these last two years:
- a friendly support staff;
- less then perfect system up time;
- nagging latency issues I suspect are inherent with the GS architecture; and
- recent slow/error prone dB issues.
I’ve noted different levels of latency, usually as a nagging brief hesitation before the site/page begins to load, but it’s gotten worst lately. I believe MT has worked hard to minimize it but it never entirely goes away.
As far as slow dB and random dB connection errors, I eventually purchased an additional add on MY-SQL container for my site hosting in an effort to improve the performance, but saw almost no difference. WordPress Admin pages would often take a full minute to open…that gets old.
Many of these issues were intermittent so it was hard to define what exactly was the issue or to even describe it. I did log a number of trouble reports about site performance and was recently informed by support that it was my sites issue due to the number of WordPress Plugins and dB tables.
I use a number of WP Plugins, but I’m careful what I install, testing each before putting them on line. I was certain that wasn’t the issue.
Last week I decided to test an exact duplicate of Meandering Passage on a standard shared hosting solution to see what the performance level would be. This morning I got the duplicate site up running with full data as well as all plugins and discovered the performance was noticeably better then MT GS…with no latency.
This past weekend Meandering Passage was up and down a dozen times due to a disk storage cluster issue at MT. In the heat of the moment it wasn’t a difficult call deciding to make the duplicate install of Meandering Passage the primary one and cancel my MT hosting.
This decision was even easier since this new hosting is 1/4 the cost of what I was paying at MT.
There are good people at MT and they seem to, for the most part, be dedicated to providing good customer experience. I do however believe there are real technical issues with the GS hosting system that negatively affects their GS customers experience.
I’m currently hosting with ICDSoft.
Note: I am not in any way affiliated with Media Temple or ICDSoft besides being a customer.
This is an interesting time for your post, as I’ve been having progressively worse performance at my site too. I thought I’d add my two cents to talk about my hosting provider, MidPhase. They have great prices, and include SSH/shell access which I’ve found pretty uncommon among hosting providers, but I have the same problem you describe having with MT. There’s a lot of latency, and it seems to be linked to two factors: routing and basic overloaded servers. MidPhase simply can’t keep their server load down. I’m guessing it’s because they put too many sites per server, and the routing seems to be related to their server farm too, as several programmer friends and myself have traced the route and noticed highest latency at their servers.
In any case, I’ll be interested to see how ICDSoft works out for you in the long-term. I’m going to switch providers, but it’s hard to find reliable reviews online (MidPhase, for instance, was pretty highly rated when I switched to them!).
@Seinberg: In the past I’ve used providers who oversold their servers, that’s one reason I’d switched to Media Temple.
Finding good honest reviews for hosting providers is almost impossible. Most of the review sites are fronts or paid sites.
Here’s one comparison report I found and used based upon the number of Google hits from happy or angry users:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/host.html
It’s been updated recently and I thought it was as good a way to judge sites as any. So far ICDSoft is good and they do seem to have very fast support.
I had recently purchased MT hosting and noticed the same thing. I am now on both MT and another WP site of mine with heavier traffic is on BlueHost with my own dedicated IP. I’m assuming this helps out because I have had excellent response time on BlueHost. There’s been no drama to speak of with BlueHost. I’m quite happy with BH so far.
@Matt George: Thanks for sharing you’ve had some of the same MT experiences. If ICDSoft doesn’t work out I’ll take a look at BlueHost.
Hi Earl —
Checking in to see how ICDSoft is working out. MidPhase is worse than ever, so I’m going to switch very soon.
@Seinberg: So far I’ve nothing bad to say about ICDSoft. The cost is reasonable, up-time has been great and site performance is a lot better then what I was experiencing with Media Temples Grid hosting. I’ve only had to contact ICDSoft support one time and I was pleased with the quick and helpful email response I received.
At least to this point it was a good switch!