Summary
I moved to MediaTemple’s Grid hosting platform in the beginning of January, I think I’ve used the service enough to post a review on the service. Personally I’m very happy with the service, no complains at all in fact, good customer service, barely any downtime and fast FTP which is all you pretty much look for in a host. Below is the detailed review covering every (for the most part) aspect of the service.
- Reliability
MediaTemple’s GS hosting has been very satisfactory in terms of reliability, there’s virtually 99% uptime, I manage 7 websites on the GS server, there are occasional downtime situations (including yesterday), however this lasts for a few minutes the most. There might have been one time where downtime was around 1 hour. Apart from that the servers have been pretty fast and steady.
The GS server is mainly promoted by boasting uptime during traffic spikes and rightfully so, the server was steady with occasional traffic spikes I got from Stumbleupon maybe a couple of times.
- Ease of use
The Media Temple account management and control panel are quite straight forward and easy to use, they provide 1-click installation of popular applications, Wordpress, Drupal and Zencart (they could work on the number of options here as comparatively, to similar services like the GoDaddy hosting connection which offers several more 1-click installations MediaTemple is quite far behind.) They provide several usage reports (bandwidth, GPU, Disk, visitors) to keep track of your server.
- Price
Grid hosting with Media Temple costs $20/month. This is probably one of the factors that can be improved on, since grid hosting is still a fairly new concept and not available by many web hosting providers yet, it is compared to ‘economy’ hosting of other web hosting providers which are available from $5/month depending on the host. Personally, I think the price can be reduced a notch, while I am still happy to pay the $20 a month for a server that is really secure.
- FTP
I use Filezilla to manage FTP transfers and Media Temple offers very fast transfer rates (as opposed to my previous host, Godaddy).
I use Gmail to manage my custom email domains, and I suggest you do the same with whatever hosting provider you use. MediaTemple is equipped with SquirrelMail, Atmail and RoundCube to manage your email accounts, which are all popular web mail services, you may use the one you prefer.
- Popularity
Media Temple is still appreciating in terms of popularity as more reputed brands shift towards the service, they already boast several established brands (including Sony, Adobe, Techcrunch, etc.) that host with the service so you’ll be in good company if you plan to host with Media Temple.
- Help and Customer Support
Media Temple provides great customer support, I had to mail them a couple of times (the 1-click Wordpress installation creates a htaccess file that redirects your site to the Media Temple home page, wasn’t aware of it), and received a reply in just a couple of hours maybe, both times, thus very prompt customer support, also queries are to the point and not excessive or ‘indirect’ (as opposed to GoDaddy’s email support sometimes which can get a little excessive and doesn’t really solve the query. I didn’t have the need to call customer support yet (I generally would if there are several hours of downtime) but I’m pretty sure it should match the email support standards. (Any feedback on this in the comments would be appreciated).
Their knowledge base and user forums already contains a wealth of information which will probably cover all your doubts so you wouldn’t probably need customer support in the first place.
- Overall
If you’ve read the review above, it’s mostly been on a positive note, some of the factors they need to work on are probably their price and 1-click applications, apart from that, it’s a pretty neat service and I’d recommend it to anyone who can fit $20/month into their hosting budget. Any feedback on the service in the comments would be much appreciated.
