Media Temple Grid Server | Comments (10)
Posted in Hosting, Muffin Research Labs on 30th January 2007, 10:00 am by Stuart
I’ve been following with interest the progress of Media Temple Grid Server, as I am certainly interested in a hosting supplier that can give some level of redundancy and thus provide a seamless continuity of service should specific servers experience a hardware failure.
Currently I’m on a dedicated server and the problem with that is that should the server experience some kind of major software or hardware failure then it’s up to me to either fix it or restore it which is fine but you will have inevitable downtime.
As my server is up for renewal very soon I am wondering, should I try the Grid Server or look at the Virtual Dedicated service. The specs of the Grid server are obviously tempting, but since launch it would seem they’ve had a few problems with their service. I’ve noticed at least two blogs that are hosted on the Grid Server but have been unavailable due to MySQL problems.
The only other issue I have is that I am seriously evaluating Django and as yet there is no support for Django on the Grid Server, though hopefully at some point this would be added.
So what are your views, is the Grid Server too good to be true or the best thing to ever happen to web hosting?
I’m on (dv) 3 having moved over from (dv) 2 and think the price and flexibility are great. I run multiple sites on the server for multiple clients without any problems. I know basic Linux administration on top of Plesk so it suits me well.
As for the (gs) I’ve heard many people who loathe it and think it is a marketing term rather than anything really new. I’ve also noticed a few sites not running well on (gs) – Mark Boulton being one of them.
(dv)3 doesn’t have out of the box support for PHP5 which might be a consideration although you can get round it.
(gs) has Ruby and PHP4 and 5. $20 a month is not really going to break the bank though and you can always upgrade to a (dv) if you need to.
For my two pence worth I have no complaints on (dv)3 – it costs less than my mobile phone bill too!
I am on (gs) at the time being and while there were a couple of issues with it, I haven’t experienced anything serious recently.
I’m currently in the process of moving all of my sites away from the (gs) at (mt) to another provider. Since the grid has been put into production, I’ve experienced nothing but latency issues, poor MySQL performance, and downtime. The (gs) was actually a lot more stable in beta than it has been in production.
If you run any mission critical apps, or have any client sites on board, I would think twice about the (gs). The concept behind it is awesome, however the implementation leaves something to be desired.
Have to agree with Jeff, takes around 8 seconds to load the first page of a site in some cases, I have some websites hosted on Site5 which do not have this problem so I can’t blame the distance factor (I’m in Scotland).
@Jeff: Care to mention your new provider? I’m certainly interested in considering all options.
@Stuart: I’m in the process of migrating to some shared space at A Small Orange. Great service (I was a customer about a year back) and their service offering and pricing is very competitive.
If you are thinking about moving to the gs, make sure that you dont miss this article from the mt blog. Extremely informative, and commendable that they wrote it up. (I run about 30 sites in a $20/mo gs account.)
@Chris: While I agree that it was excellent of them to write that up, it doesn’t dismiss all of the latency issues that have been occurring on the grid lately.
They apparently added more hardware “clusters” to the grid that was supposed to fix the problem, and the next day we were back to square one with more latency problems. I know it’s a huge system, but I really feel that it wasn’t ready for production use just yet and should have spent more time in testing. I was part of the beta program and while it was great to see this new technology develop, there just wasn’t enough of us to really push the system to its limits.
But, I digress, this thread was supposed to be about helping Stu to pick a new hosting provider and I’ve kind of hijacked things.
Please, check this out.
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