Media Temple (mt) - A review of the Grid Hosting Service
I recently had the opportunity to read reviews on various hosting solutions and even test a few, some for quite some time. The least of which (in terms of the length of subscription) was Media Temple Grid Hosting. This solution is similar to Rackspace CloudSites in that each account is provided with a specific number of compute cycles per period. Unlike Amazon EC2, Neither Rackspace CloudSites nor Media Temple gives a clear translation or commitment on processor speed - Amazon actually tells you the frequency of the virtual processor that you are getting. Before I digress and talk about Amazon and others, let me focus on the opinions I formed and what I discovered about the Media Temple Grid hosting solution.
My first impression was that the User Interface (UI/UX) for (mt) Grid service is impressive and intuitive in a Web 2.0 kind of way. There were some strong points relative to Rackspace CloudSites, but what turned me away from this service is:
- Some features were unstable (mySQL version setting)
- Tech Support response time
- Too similar to shared-hosting
- Possibility of a site being shut down if the exceeds some resource limits
It is one thing to be told clearly and plainly that there are limitations to a feature, and then it is another, and quite undesirable to see one thing, but later find out that it is slightly different (ref: the grid service that is seemingly shared hosting with the possibility to connect to a dedicated DB virtual server for an additional $20/month). The troublesome breaking-point for me was that: after installing Drupal on the server, I kept getting a PHP error. I decided to run phpinfo () to see what the configuration was; I was surprised to see that PHP was reporting a mySQL version 4.xx while I had set it to PHP5 in the server configuration. This is is the nagging bug that made me decide to move on and find a better (albeit more expensive) hosting solution that would provide a more stable hosting solution
That said, the unique feature that I liked with the (mt) Grid Hosting solution, and that I would like to see implemented by other server-farms is the ability to buy and attach additional mySQL containers (dedicated virtual DB servers).
