Anyone Media Temple Grid Server Hosting?
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groups: Consulting and Business · Marketplace
xamox - Tue, 2007-01-23 14:45
I was curious if anyone has this host, I was curious as to if it's worth paying for the service or not. I notice they have one click installs of drupal. I currently have dreamhost which is a good host but the Grid Service media temple provides is quite inticing espically considering it isn't a whole lot more than what I pay for dreamhost.
Not bad
I have a legacy client on MT and after a bumpy start -- they were still very much in beta, it seems -- it overall has worked out. This client had problems with shared hosts, and the gridservers seem to be handling the occasional traffic spikes quite well. We've also seen an overall trend towards improved performance and reduced server load.
I would not recommend it for any mission-critical sites, obviously, but for the hobby site, MT seems okay for Drupal.
Laura
pingVision, LLC
Awesome, thanks for the
Awesome, thanks for the quick reply. Yeah I personally never have had a problem with Dreamhost being down. But I'm in the process of starting a web developer business and I don't want my clients sites going down because I know they'll be at my neck.
http://xamox.NET
Laura could you comment again on MT?
I appreciate your post and am considering MT. It has been 9 months since your post and I am curious if you would make another comment? Have things worked out or is there another direction that I should consider?
Thank you in advance and in closing I want to encourage newbies to your site so they can start thinking outside the box.
http://www.pingv.com/ is a great site. Very unique design. Clean, bright, and easy to navigate.
Peace.
Look elsewhere
The above comment is still spot-on.
MT is appropriate for a hobbyist site, not appropriate for business use. Downtime is too frequent. The problem with grid hosting is that when the grid goes down, everyone's site goes down. Grid hosting is a great concept and is possibly the future of hosting, but right now, nobody has it right. After being with them for a while after the move to grid hosting, I'm convinced that it will probably take another 2 years before grid hosting (from any company) becomes reliable enough to use.
Our experience is that sites
Our experience is that sites on MT still perform rather slowly rather consistently. One of our developers has his blog on another host using a grid and has had better luck, but it escapes me at the moment what that company is. Our operations manager also had what sounds like a good experience with a gridserver setup he managed at his previous job. So I wouldn't say that the problem with MT is gridservers in general, but rather you get what you pay for. Grid hosting at shared hosting prices is going to perform like shared hosting.
Laura
pingVision, LLC
Thanks for the Host Info
Dustin - thanks - I know I am not the only person who will appreciate this info. I am looking at VPN through MT, any chance you have a comment on that service?
Thanks again - peace.
Media Temple Dedicated Virtual Server
We use MT's DV server on a regular basis for us and our clients and we find the service to be great. Out of the box though, additional configuration is needed for the dv server. As configured out of the shoot, MT's Dv server just has too much overhead. I can't find the original article I used to minimize the native overhead but a quick google revealed a plethora of configuration suggestions to help minimize this. I do have to say though, that MT's technical support is amazing. Anything from simple issues or questions to fatal mistakes on my behalf. They will do what ever it takes. I can even call them and get the same quality support that I would through the account center, which is something amazing compared to previous hosts I have used. While I do most of my crucial administration through terminal the MT account center is simple and easy to use, giving you access to just about anything you would need to configure. The DV server uses plesk for server administration which is ok I guess, much better than cpanel. MT provides ssh on all servers I believe and with the DV server at least you can gain root access. I find that alone a potential deciding factor.
Peace,
-mpare
Pare Technologies
Drupal Consulting, Themeing, and Module Development
806.781.8324 | 806.733.3025
www.paretech.com
Figure Something Out? Document Your Success!
MT is appropriate for a
Would you say the same for MT dv servers? I'm about to switch from share hosting to them, is the downtime you were talking about just in grid hosting or also their dedicated servers? If you think I'd probably be better off with another provider, do you ave any suggestions?
Easy Speedy ES3020
I am happy with the service. Had some power bumps about 5 months ago. We carry almost 200 domains so at 90 euros it works out to less than $1 per month per domain.
You might ask mfer about it
mfer mentioned MT on one of his GeeksAndGod podcasts.
I recently checked it out myself, because the idea of redundant servers for a small monthly fee is very enticing to me (after a recent outage), but I don't know about how their service is, and that would be more important to me.
Also, another thing to note is that their Drupal one-click install is still currently only 4.7.3.
Having used both, I can
Having used both, I can definitely say that MT's grid server is way faster than DH. It's not even close in that regard. As far as support goes, DH seems to respond more quickly to emails, but MT tends to fix the problem more quickly. And the only sort of problems experienced at MT have been sites being unable to access the mysql databases, whereas DH is more likely to have problems with whole sites being down. Just got an email saying they were rolling out a new version, so hopefully those problems will be a thing of the past.
I also tried the one-click install once and it was stupid easy - but it's only good if you don't want to use 5.1.
Arp Laszlo
http://www.inkwire.net
Yeah, everyone has told me
Yeah, everyone has told me dreamhost is a lot slower because mysql servers are located in a different place. I have been pretty disappointed with them lately.
http://xamox.NET
I have http://mon.itor.us/
I have http://mon.itor.us/ keeping an eye on a couple of sites and over the last week there have been several instances of downtime - 3 of them yesterday. I'll be moving all live sites off dh and keep the hosting for testing until the contract runs out. Apparently, you do get what you pay for. My next thing would be to find a cheaper domain registrar than MT.
Awesome! Thanks for that
Awesome! Thanks for that website link. I think I'll be switching hosting providers too. Their service has seem to go to shit for me the past few months and I can not have these type of issues with clients. I couldn't even access the panel the other day when I severely needed to.
http://xamox.NET
Beware!
The Grid Server has had a lot of problems over the past month an a half. Check out this link to see the horrible lag times: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p-Ab3UaY590VDhZCTaDinHg
Version 1.2 of the Grid introduced MySQL containers which has improved things greatly. If MT can straiten things out this will be the best hosting deal on the web IMO but for now I'd be very cautious.
Rick
Alright, thanks for the
Alright, thanks for the heads up. Like I said I currently have dreamhost but have kind of been disappointed with them lately, they have been having a lot of problems and my sites have a very slow response time which I can't have for customers. So I've been considering alternatives, if anyone has them I would greatly appreciate it.
You can see all the problems dreamhost has been having at:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com
http://xamox.NET
MT Experience
I use MT grid to create quick mockup sites for clients, and for my own projects
If you have a client that needs solid hosting, use MT's http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/ (or another reputable VPS0. The client should understand that reliable hosting costs more (not much more, really)
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Blog
Thanks for the Host Info
Glad to get this info. Was hoping the company was solid so really appreciate the feedback. Thanks!
Grid Hosting Comparison
I've looked at mediatemple and also at hostingplex are there any other grid/cluster companies to compare?
http://netpaths.net
Media temple is a good
Media temple is a good company.
My experience is that these gridhosts are not so great for mission critical sites. I use them now mostly for flatfile Perl wiki farms, which seem to work quite well even under heavy load. Media temple and other grid hosts usually work well, but when they crash, they crash hard and long. Just too experimental and unreliable for a database-backed system like Drupal, IMO.
I have started moving my Drupal development pretty much exclusively to VPS services. Partially because of relaibility, and partially because of the control you have with root access to the machine.
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation
MediaTemple (gs) + Zend Optimizer?
I'm shopping around for better hosting due to overall slowness & increasingly exceeding memory limits where I'm at now, and have been looking at MediaTemple's grid service for low to medium traffic sites.
I've read a lot of reports that the MT(gs) service has performance issues of its own, but no mention of whether or not folks experiencing those performance issues are using Zend optimizer or not, which I understand is available and configurable on MT(gs)???
I understand database performance is another issue for folks on this service, and MT has come up with some new approaches to improving MySQL performance... but I wouldn't be too excited about doubling or tripling the base gridservice price point, just to get decent database performance?! :\ I could just go dedicated or VPS if that becomes the case.
Another question: Any recommendations for other good drupal-ready hosts that offer Zend optimizer or other PHP optimizers (eAccelerator, APC, XCache)?
Thx
Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
Media temple stuff
For what it is worth I am having a fairly good run with a media temple split system:
I found the GS just couldn't handle our drupal site, even in dev (read 2 users testing)
The split environment was a breeze to setup. The only difficulties I am having is drupal email messages sent to the same domain don't make through.
Also, I found I was able to have the "managed" os stuff still active in conjunction with root access to the DV. I was mainly trying to keep avoid making my client have to pay for an admin.
One note, I found the DB container on the GS to have no effect, and possibly actually be worse (seemed to be more fail to connect to DB errors) .
Anyway: 4000 general sessions a day - mostly not logged in, plenty of modules (including memory suckers like event, image, image cache), 2 months on the split GS DV , seems to be working out pretty well.
On big caveat, I was having some max DB packet size issues when I first transferred over. I requested root, upped the memory settings, and that resolved.
good luck
Will Kirchheimer
I'm not happy with MT
Neither grid nor DV seem to perform adequately. I'm a big fan of barebones VPS accounts. Rimuhosting and Slicehost seem the most talked about, I ended up choosing Rimuhosting.
Agreed
Agreed. VPS is the way to go, apart from special cases (e.g. a site is mainly accessed by anonymous users, and you install boost)
I have also tried both Slicehost and Rimuhosting. Both have good support. There are cheaper VPSes out there, but no support.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.