Dave and his cat moogs.  I think that is how you spell the name.

Here at Paravel, we have been hosting many of our sites on a couple of Media Temple DV accounts that we have sentimentally named Zuul and Gozer.  These have performed well and we have overall been really pleased with the service.

When the time came for us to launch one of our largest projects to date we decided it would be best to isolate this site from all our others and give it a unique hosting account of its own.  Without doing much research, we  signed up for a Media Temple GS account and launched the site after months of testing.

Sure enough, days after our October 2008 launch date we began seeing unacceptable amounts of down time.  Some days we would see at a few instances of down time, about 15 minutes or so.  Lately we have seen full days of the GS servers being down on and off all day, with about 50% uptime.  

Initially, when opening support tickets with Media Temple and waiting 4 hours or more for a response we’d hear back that the problem is likely related to our DB queries created by our site built on cake php.  We did extensively look into this, but having over 20 sites successfully running on very similar code, we felt like that was a cop out.  Lately, MT customers on “cluster 2″ of their GS servers have been checking the system status over at media temple, getting vague answers as to what is going on.  The most Media Temple has done to “make it right” with customers is offer free months of GS service.  I can respect that, but I’d prefer more concrete details as to what is going on.  It’s like going to your favorite burger joint, getting food poisoning from the beef and returning to complain only to get an offer for another burger.  

Over the past 3 weeks we have been monitoring the site on the GS service and have since made the call to move the site to our much more reliable DV servers, which we are happy with.  I truly hope Media Temple can sort this GS service situation out.  The purpose of our posting this isn’t to bash MT, rather to help our friends out there on the inter-web avoid a similar waste of time, worry and resources.

Conversation courtesy of  Michael “Anthony”,  A dear friend.

Tip to all “web designers” out there… If your online portfolio says you built a site using dreamweaver, what you are really saying is that you have no idea how to effectively code an HTML page.  Now, I know we all start somewhere and I will happily admit using the handy dandy software in the early days of Paravel.  I just think that if you are going to call yourself a web designer, or start a web design business you should be able to open up a text editor and code a basic HTML page.  

The point here is that even if you do use dreamweaver to build all your sites, it isn’t a good idea to broadcast that.  How would you feel if your surgeon’s experience failed to extend beyond a few hours each week playing Operation.  Granted, no one needs a PHD to build a website, but you should know what you’re working with.

While I am pretty OK at just about anything, I find that I’m good or great at very little.  If there is anything I am truly great at, it would be knowing people who are truly great at what they do, and being both thrilled to know them as well as furiously jealous that I can’t trick them out of their powers.  Firstly, Dave taught me just about everything I know about coding and web design, and by “just about everything” I mean “everything-everything”.  Secondly, Reagan Freaking Ray can draw and draw.  I just can’t.

 Lately, Robert Feuille has pissed me off big time.  He isn’t a niche photographer that takes great pictures of “X”.  There aren’t enough letters in the damn alphabet to itemize the things he shoots beautifully.  We have been traveling around Texas interviewing food producers / providers and taking pictures of what they do.  We’ll have pictures to show you from our travels soon, but in the meantime, hire him before he is booked for life.