Media Temple Grid-Service (gs) hosting
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.
