Media Temple Review

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Updated 9-15-2010: After several years and about 50 sites, I’m still thrilled with Media Temple. Just so you know, I don’t make a dime off of anything when you buy Media Temple. Actually, I could get a free month’s hosting for everyone who goes there and signs up, but I’ve chosen not to. In fact, I created this site in direct opposition to all the “review” sites out there that really just want to get commissions from hosting companies. Read the following so you know what you are getting; then go to mediatemple.net, or click the picture above, and sign up. Simple as that. The only way this could really be the wrong choice for you would be if you were extremely price sensitive and/or just beginning and needed lots of “bells and whistles” to get your site going. Even if you are in the latter category, if you are serious about running your own little spot in cyberspace, you probably need to learn to use things like your own FTP program, anyway. By the way, if you don’t feel Media Temple is right for you, and you want something cheaper and easier to use, go see my HostGator review. Bottom Line: Between these two companies, there’s really no reason to consider anyone else.

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So these are the big boys, the really, really big boys. They do hosting for some of the largest companies in the world, like ABC, NBC, Sony and Starbucks. Whether you want to run one huge site, or a bunch of sites on one account and have immense power behind them, Media Temple is your spot.

Please note: if you have been to other website hosting review sites, you should realize that I rate based on personal experience (rather than hosting company marketing) and am usually a tough grader. Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:
Pricing:
Speed and Uptime:
Bandwidth and Storage:
Power Rating:
Customer Service:
Ease of Use:
Overall:

Hosting Plans and Scalability:  

Media Temple offers full grid hosting, along with dedicated and reseller hosting, but it is the grid hosting where they truly shine and the only thing you should consider outside of the reseller hosting. For this one, infinitely scalable plan alone, I would give them a 5. Using distributed hosting across their vast network of servers, your sites stay up and fast. You are given a generous portion of CPU units, storage, and bandwidth, and if you exceed your amount? Well, you just get charged a tiny bit extra.

Generally speaking, I’m not reviewing reseller programs at this point, but I should mention that you cannot resell, or cannot officially resell, grid hosting.

Pricing:  

To be able to get this type of cloud hosting for $20 per month is unbelievable. You essentially get the most powerful solution available for less than $1 per day.

Speed and Uptime:  

At the basic grid level, it’s not what I would consider blazing fast, just fast. But in some ways it is better than blazing fast. By that I mean that your performance is unrelated to the amount of traffic you are getting. That’s special. Obviously, you can put a stupid site design up that takes forever to load no matter where you go, but if you are looking for consistent performance that can handle incredible traffic, Media Temple is what you are looking for.

As for uptime, I run a bunch of sites there and am constantly on them.  In the last six months, I went down briefly for a scheduled maintenance (middle of the night on a weekend), and had one other time when I was down for about 2 seconds.  That’s pretty darn good.

Bandwidth and Storage:  

Unlike shared hosting companies that promise “unlimited” bandwidth, Media Temple puts a limit up, though you are unlikely to ever use it. But what happens if you do? They don’t shut you down, they just contact you and tell you that you will pay, for instance, 10 cents per extra GPU, which is very good.

Power Rating:  

It doesn’t get better anywhere.

Customer Service:  

A lot of people mistake customer service for the people who fix all their problems, and they become bitter when customer service only does the thing they are really supposed to do. Like most power hosts, however, Media Temple has people who really know what is going on. I’ve called them twice and used the support ticket once and had very fast resolutions to my problems. They have toll free customer support 24/7.

Ease of Use:  

You get automated installation of three software platforms, WordPress, Drupal and ZenCart. It is very easy to manage your domains and databases with their custom control panel. Overall, they are very easy to use, and this rating would be higher if they had more software installations available or an in-house FTP. I can see where they might not be the most intuitive place to build a site if you are new to doing such things, but I wouldn’t consider them especially difficult by any means.

Overall:  

Media Temple grid service is truly the end all solution for people looking for brute strength.  You simply can’t outgrow them, and their pricing is fantastic at this level.

100 GBs of premium storage
1 TB of short-path bandwidth
100 unique sites / alternate domains
64MB Ruby on Rails (RoR) GridContainer (for accounts opened on or before September 1, 2008)
A free 30-day trial for any entry-level sized GridContainer. (RoR, Django, MySQL)
1,000 GPUs (that’s a good number)
100 databases
1,000 email addresses

If you would like to check out a site hosted on Media Temple, you may go here: Funny Emails (very high traffic and relatively complex site) or here Web Hosting