UPDATE May 20th, 2008: this has been resolved completely. A new post has been made. See:
MediaTemple GS update.
We currently have sites hosted on 4 different companies Mosso Shared Cluster, Hostgator Shared Server, GoDaddy Shared Server and MediaTemple Grid Server. We have been looking to put everything together in one place, but just have not yet found a one size fits all solution.
Hostgator has been great for a few smaller blogs that don’t get as much traffic as a lot of other blogs. Additionally installing new ones is quick and their tech support is great – although I can’t say that I’ve really ever had to contact them. They do offer ssh access if you need it for your shared site. If you are planning on using them for a lot of disk space just read the terms – they say that if you have more than 50,000 files on the site, then they will not be backing up your server. In case you did the math for the 600 gigs of disk space you get – thats an average of 12 megs per file.
GoDaddy is currently hosting a SSL enabled blog we run that sells products and that is because when it was hosted on Mosso – it ran so slow people thought the site was down. Ten to fifteen second page load times were common on Mosso with this setup so we moved the site. Normally I just use Godaddy for Domain Registrations and not hosting. But for the price of the one hosting account, I couldn’t refuse. If the performance gets worse than at Mosso, I’ll move the site. GoDaddy has great support and a great refund policy.
Mosso has been the host for this blog and the article directory for the last year – over all – its been an ok experience. At times it was great and everything went very smoothly. At other times its been very rocky and hard to get anything to work. The support staff there has always tried to help to the best that they can. But more often than not the issues I was having were not issues other people were having and usually it was due to the script that runs the article directory. However a few months ago they announced a request based billing system – so it is no longer a cost effective solution.
MediaTemple – we moved a site to their grid service after looking for a new host for some of our sites that are currently on mosso. The first site we moved is much smaller than ArticleSnatch and the guys in sales said oh that won’t be a problem just put it on the grid service and you will be all set. Moving the site and the database over was cake – with the SSH access you get to the machine. This alone was a huge plus compared to mosso. So we moved the one site over and about 3 days later, got an email saying that it had exceeded the MySql shared resources and would be bumped into a capacity system for a few days. Then I got the same email again after it came out of the capacity system. So I just bought a 256meg mysql container for the site – thus doubling the hosting bill for $40/month.
Thing have been relatively smooth at Mediatemple until yesterday (see below). The GPU usage (their form of monitoring CPU time) has been about 1/3 of what you get included for the month. Overall it works pretty well. It is slower to respond than the site hosted at Mosso, but no request based billing. As for support, most times I’ve called in I was on hold for an average of 15 minutes. One time it said I would be on hold for 50 minutes – I hung up. Seems that morning is the best time to call.
Yesterday – about 24 hours ago – I noticed that the site started giving a 403 error. At first I thought that I broke something in the .htaccess file, so I open up FTP. It won’t let me connect. So I check the system status – it says intermittent speed issues. So I called support, was told it would be 30 minutes to wait, so I hung up. I put in a ticket instead. I got a reply a few minutes later saying “The issue you have reported has been identified by (mt) Media Temple as possibly being part of a wider problem affecting more than one customer. An internal incident (INC# 393) has been opened to track the issue and to provide you collective updates as progress is made toward a resolution.” She also included a link to the status site above. Ok great – nothing to do so I forgot about it.
This morning I check the site – still down. So I call MediaTemple – this time only 6 people in line. I speak to a customer support rep who says that he will have an admin look into it. When they were moving people, my site was supposedly moved to the new location (or so they thought). But the files never made it. Thus explaining why I can’t even ftp to the site. So he said that it would be resolved shortly and he put in a ticket. That was 8 hours ago and it still is not resolved. If you review the status site from today – it seems they have been very busy over there they have even made a whole category for this incident.
So where do we stand now – well – we certainly won’t host anything critical at mediatemple. But going forward I think for the $40/month we pay we will be seeking an alternative host for that site. I’ve been looking at Joyent and several others. As for the sites we host at mosso, we are looking for a dedicated / colocated server to run the site so that we will have a lot more control over what scripts can be used, etc.
Want to help? Know a great host – please let me know!
Have you had similar or opposite experiences with these hosts? feel free to comment below. Remember when commenting – use your name not a keyword.
UPDATE 5/14/2008 8pm: After 25 hours of total downtime – the site is back up.
UPDATE 5/15/2008 9am: I received an email that mediatemple is crediting my account with 3 months service due to the downtime.
UPDATE 5/15/2008 1:30pm: The site is down again – and I can’t even login to the FTP client again. I called tech support – wait time estimated of 25 minutes.
UPDATE 5/20/2008: See updated post.
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Very interesting article, I was just hoping that you would have ended telling us you had a magical solution. I use godaddy and bluehost but am looking for a host in France – where I am located. Any ideas on that, feel free to tell me.
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@Richard – nope I don’t have the solution yet… still looking for it. I’m leaning more and more toward a colacted server.
I really disliked GoDaddy hosting. Their banners promise the world – but as soon as you add a nice big site on their servers expect HUGE problems! It works great for small sites – nothing larger.
Why not just purchase a dedicated server at Hostgator? I See that you already use them. I had a HUGE Site on a Quad core Hostgator beast, and it ran perfectly fine. The site had under 6k alexa rank as well at one time. It must be crazy trying to manage websites across 4+ hosts! That 23 hour downtime is simply inexcusable. They need to refund you the months server bill for that sort of shenanigans.
I am rather disappointed with MT’s latest 403 fiasco. I wrote them several emails saying I expected better of them and considering their client list you’d think they’d be more on the ball with the support.
That said, MT has been a good host overall. When not inundated with panicked customers, their phone support is usually pretty quick. My sites went down with 403 and then went back up again in about 15 minutes. The 403 recurred the next day at about the same time, so it is possible you may have had the same experience. None of my files were lost though. I just renewed by sub so I will stick with them for another year, though I really hope they don’t go too downhill, they have been good hosts for a long time.
@bape – I’ve hosted a small site there, as well as one that got a about 250k page views/month and did 2TB of bandwidth (we hosted a 10 meg movie) – and it was on the $15 godaddy plan without issue.
@John – I’m thinking about it. We are leaning toward a dedicated server for articlesnatch. The other sites are small enough that they don’t really warrant a huge server cost. Its not bad to manage them across the four hosts – as most are wordpress and just manage from the web end. But yes I agree the 23 hours is bad.
MediaTemple did issue a 3 month credit for the 25 hours of downtime.
@Charlene – I put in a ticket as soon as my site was down and they said it was part of an “issue”. So they just disregarded it. They didn’t realize that they had completely removed my site from the internet…. I’m glad that I wasn’t the only one, but I was not glad that they just chalked up my ticket to routine without checking into it further to realize they goofed.
Thank you for considering Joyent on your short-list of alternatives. If you have any specific questions, please give me a call. You can reach me at 415 – 692 – 1976.
Rod Boothby
VP. Platform Evangelism @ Joyent
Solution: Dreamhost. They’re the best, hands down.
@Michael – thanks I’ll take a look at this on monday.
@Rod – I will be calling you as well to discuss what we likely need.
@Karen – interesting – I’ve never heard of anyone using dreamhost for large sites. I know a lot of people use it for smaller sites on shared host.
I have an ecommerce site hosted at media temple and it is sooo sloww and this outage added extra bonus to me. I am considering http://www.myhosting.com for hosting. They have nice pricing and an effective community site located at http://portal.myhosting.com. Does any of you have any experiences related to myhosting?
Thank you,
Nice article, and I am myself looking for good and reliable host for my websites and this article is definitely helping me in choosing one.. thanks
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I have go daddy for several different sites and it does the job for what I want. I am sure there are better hosting comapines but you can’t beat go daddys pricing.
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I’m not really a huge fan of GoDaddy. I had an image hosting server on there with one of their unlimited bandwidth plans, and after I started pushing too much traffic I got disabled…
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HI, i have my site in Hostgator and now thinking to switch server.. thanks for the information..
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