Alex Williams

Sometimes we make decisions that are so well researched that they can’t possibly be wrong.

Today, I realized I was so, SO wrong about MediaTemple. I’ll keep it simple: they suck.

Today, my clients and I experienced some serious slowness for 7 hours and complete downtime for nearly 3 hours (maybe more?). These days, that kind of downtime is totally unacceptable. I don’t monitor my website by the minute, so when I realized there was a problem, it was way too late for me to do anything about it. That’s their job, that’s why I pay them, right?

I’m used to hosting my own websites on servers I fully manage, so making the jump to an outsourced hosting platform in California was a bit of a risk. I needed to reduce the overhead of setting up, configuring, maintaining and monitoring servers so I figured “why not get that cheap shared-hosting plan from MT?”. Well… I got my answer: “you get what you pay for”.

The thing that frustrates me is that none of their big clients like Nike, Starbucks or Sony seem to complain. Of course not! They have big dedicated servers with LOTS of redundancy and fault tolerance. Who cares about the little guys, right?

Worst of all, this is not the first time it happens. In less than a year i’ve experienced over 20 scheduled and unscheduled maintenances (proof: MT Scheduled Maintenance) and If you check their “blog” (moderated comments, btw), they’re quick to hide all previous system incidents. I’ve been their client for almost a year but I can guarantee it won’t be much longer than that.

Off to buy some Dell’s err… ;)