I’ve been eyeing the MediaTemple hosting plans for a while, and after a weekend of being unable to edit any of my sites because of intermittent downtime and crippled FTP, I’ve finally made the switch. I’ve read lots of good reviews and a few bad ones and I’m not too happy with the downsides of shared hosting but have no need for a virtual server, so we’ll see how it goes. Given my past experience positive experiences with MediaTemple support (my employer hosts with them), I suspect that I’ll be very happy even if they can’t deliver on perfect uptime. I’ve found that quality support is better than delivering on pie-in-the-sky promises every time. Plus now I can finally use PHP 5 (and be able to run PHP 4 side-by-side if necessary), which is pretty freaking cool.
The migration was super easy (although I haven’t moved beckism.net over just yet, so there’s more to do), and hopefully you’ll be seeing better uptime and speed from my sites in the future. Because they were down so often and so sluggish before. Oh well. I’m a nerd, and a terabyte of bandwidth impresses me, even if I’ll barely use a fraction of it in a given month. At least now I can host the Things screencast myself without fear of running out of bandwidth.
The only question that remains is how to gain enough readers (even temporarily) that I’ll actually be able to use MediaTemple’s vaunted performance burst technology.
I admit that it’s unlikely. But a man can dream, right?
Just out of curiosity, who was your previous service provider? I’m looking to take notes and steer clear of badness…
Posted 4:58 PM on Feb. 28, 2008 ↑
My previous provider was HostingDepartment.net, but I can’t really say they were bad. Overall my experience with them was quite good. The problem was that, like most hosts, they did experience occasional downtime, and because they were located in the UK I could never get ahold of support. It just got a bit more frustrating than I liked, particularly when for a whole weekend I had no way to edit my sites (and weekends are really the only time I have to play around online).
I’d actually recommend HostingDepartment.net for people in the UK who need a cheap, small-time host, but like most cheap hosts getting quick support is where you’re going to run into trouble. They try to be responsive, and when you can get a response support is helpful, but they’re not very good on timely turnarounds and the UK-US time difference exasperated things.
Posted 8:18 AM on Feb. 29, 2008 ↑