Why you should avoid Media Temple
If you are a small company and planning on hosting your site and web services at Media Temple, stop.
All our PicMe stuff was hosted over on Media Temple. We went with them initially because of their claims of scalability. We still think they would have been a scalable solution, but the headaches just weren’t worth it anymore.
What were the headaches? Performance and a definitive lack of support.
Performance:
We’re doing photo sharing, so we’ve been serving up a lot of images. The performance of our application as a whole is dependent on the speed at which it can retrieve files from our web host. And this proved to be a significant bottleneck on Media Temple. In fact, we ran a comparison between the speed at which Media Temple could serve plain old JPEG files vs. the same exact files on a DreamHost account. DreamHost was at least 4 times faster. So just by switching to what amounts to a CHEAPER account, we get a 4x boost in our application performance. File requests weren’t the only bottleneck; PHP processing appears to suffer the same constraints on Media Temple. So not only are our file retrievals faster on DreamHost, the core processing of our web service and XML responses are around 4x faster as well.
Support:
We wanted to give Media Temple a chance. So we told them about the performance issues, even gave them access to our scripts on DreamHost and Media Temple so they could see the speed comparison for themselves. After briefly looking into the issue, here was their response:
The issue you are experiencing, may take some time to resolve. Unfortunately, we cannot give you an ETR at this point. If the server performance is unacceptable for your needs, then may want to want to look into another host for now. We promise you that we will get this issue resolved and we would appreciate if you considered us again in the future. Again we would like to apologize for not being able to assist you further and provide you with the service that you were looking for.
So we were basically told to go away. Fine.
During the migration away from Media Temple, with whom we initially registered one of our domains, we ran into a problem redirecting the domain to use the new name server at DreamHost. On the phone with Media Temple we were told that it “isn’t a big enough problem yet” and that “no one else has reported this issue yet” so they were not going to do anything about it. Huh? I understand that they use a third party to handle their registrations (OpenSRS), but we are a customer, and a service you are providing is not working. Don’t tell me its not a big enough problem yet. Get OpenSRS on the phone and fix the issue. Don’t tell me you won’t even call them because it’s not a big problem. For us, a (former) paying customer, it’s a huge problem.
But now Media Temple has lost us as a customer, and they’ve also lost all future referrals from everyone here at Raizlabs. I’ve used DreamHost for several years on JobVent.com, and the migration from Media Temple for the PicMe stuff was painless. If you need a host, avoid Media Temple, but do consider DreamHost.
September 26th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Sounds like you are in the affiliate program for dreamhost. Stop thinking about lining your pockets with referral money. Media temple is a great hosting provider. I have had no issues with support or service.
September 26th, 2007 at 9:10 am
I can honestly tell you I am not in any affiliate program for Dreamhost. If I were, wouldn’t I have given a link with a referral code so I would get credit?
Think about your accusations a little bit before you make them.
But in the end, I really don’t care what you think. You are entitled to you positive opinion of Media Temple, as I am entitled to my less flattering opinion. We had a genuinely bad experience with them, and this is not an attempt to “line my pockets”. Had Media Temple actually met our expectations, I’d be referring people to them (regardless of any silly affiliate program) instead of Dreamhost.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:59 am
[...] Blog To Rank article is brought to you using rss feeds.Here is some of the latest breaking Casey Aldridge news.The performance of our application as a whole is dependent on the speed at which it can retrieve files from our web host. And this proved to be a significant bottleneck on Media Temple. In fact, we ran a comparison between the speed at … [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
So how did you end up pointing or transferring your domain to another host? I am having the same issue. Thanks!
April 16th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
We basically had to wait for their issues with OpenSRS to get resolved. While waiting for that to happen we had set up our account with Dreamhost, copied all our applications over to the new account. It really was just a matter of waiting for their system to start responding again, and then changing the DNS entries. And eventually transferring registrars.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
its a nice article, but i am also a client of media temple, but i dont see such a issue, they support me via twitter to….
May 19th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Yoosuf…
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/03/03/media-temple-issues-credits-for-38-hour-outage/
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/05/another-lengthy-outage-for-media-temple/
There were many thousands of clients down for 10 hours to 5+ days, twice in 3 months.
Some of them were restored from “disaster recovery” backups and found that for multiple days they were running copies of their sites from 1 to 3 months ago!
Just search for mediatemple on twitter and you will see that yes, while there are happy MT clients, there are a LOT of unhappy ones as well…
October 20th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
I just moved off of MediaTemple to A Small Orange and talk about an instant speed increase. Once the nameservers took effect and I got my wp-config.php file uploaded (I was having some issues with a 66MB SQL file), my site was running perfectly. I just gotta set up Mint and that is it. ^_^;;
October 20th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
[...] wife is not the only one that has mentioned how sucky MediaTemple is. In fact, when you take a look at what others are saying about you, it is pretty obvious that your forays into the hosting industry [...]
June 7th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
I’m in the process of moving my sites from mediatemple. The constant outages are annoying, but what worries me more is the attacks on their name servers, which seems to be happening on an almost daily basis.