Hosting
A key part to doing a project like this is to having access to affordable, yet reliable hosting for the sites.
The sites are currently split between Site5, and Mediatemple.
Of the two hosts I’ve been happier with Site5’s performance and reliability.
I have a shared host account with Site5. There has only been 1 unscheduled outage in the 9 months I’ve been with them, and that only lasted about 20 minutes. One of my earlier sites made it to the Digg homepage, and performed admirably under the load.
MediaTemple has been okay, with a significant number of unscheduled outages in the 6 months I’ve been with them. To be fair they have been making a pretty large transition from their shared hosting configuration to the Grid Server environment. It’s difficult to foresee all the problems that may arise, but I feel they could have done a little better. They spent a significant amount of time beta testing the Grid Server, but seems like they didn’t put it under real world usage. When I say real world, I mean the load and usage they intended when they migrated their clients over. They do have another upgrade planned for the Grid Server, in the first week of March, which they claim will solve many of the problems they have been seeing.
I have been looking into Mosso, which seems to be a perfect setup for anyone looking to do large scale reseller hosting, which doesn’t quite fit my needs.
MediaTemple would be my preferred host if they weren’t having growing pains with the Grid Server, so I may reserve judgment until next month, but if you asked me now I’d recommend Site5.
February 27th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
I hear the growing pains are a lot better with Media Temple and they have fixed a lot, WHT seems to reflect that. Are you not seeing much improvement over the last two months?
If you get a chance maybe you could leave a review of them?
http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/site5
site5 review link - http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/rank.php?host=2781
http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/media-temple
direct review link - http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/rank.php?host=2768
thanks, Ben
February 27th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
i thought the MT grid server was going to be great, but the outages have been quite a pain. im a bit upset it took so long to fix.
However, i also have a DV with mediatemple and its just the greatest server ive ever had the privilege to manage.
February 27th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
bwb: Things are getting better with the GridServer, which is why I haven’t quite given up on MT, and taken my business elsewhere. Although there still are some ongoing issues, they seem to get resolved faster.
The big outstanding issue seems to be with the shared MySQL resources, where one bad site can taken down large parts of the Grid. The next release is supposed to fix this problem … I certainly hope so.
Daniel: MediaTemple is a good web host, I’ve seen many, many bad ones. As you say it’s a shame the GridServer had so many issues when they rolled it out. A slower migration from their shared hosting might have been advisable.
February 27th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
That is good to know I hope that is fixed, my understanding was that mysql was separated out so that wouldn’t happen but I guess I need to do more reading.
February 27th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
The MySQL portion was separated out in the sense that was hosted on different servers from the web server. However, the MySQL processes were not isolated from each other, so that one bad site consuming too many resources would affect others on the same MySQL server.
More details here:
http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/grid/mysql-container-project/