I had the worst experience ever with Media Temple and their Grid Server hosting service. I have a lot to say about the low (appalling) level of service I received, but here is what I wrote in my closing comment as to why I have chosen to close my account at (mt) gs: “The service sucked, the response was sub-par, the reliability was much lower than marketing resources or the promises of the Media Temple grid server promised, and your response to all of my requests were responded to dismissively and with no respect or quality of service.”
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
hey chris. i been looking at media temple cause they mentioned a bunch of new changes and things and looked at technorati to see what has happening with that.
This page is really slow, is it still on media temple?
I been trying to see what is slow with this site that you cancel but i looked at firebug and there was 127 requests for loading this page and it took 13.18 seconds, but when i looked at them most of them were coming from 20+ other servers from chrisabraham.com. There was a friendster.com affiliate.php that took 4.23 seconds and same with superfriendster.js that took 1.32, and twitter.com addeded up to like over 6 seconds with the 15 includes.
You have some balls man. Your site is still slow. Maybe it wasn’t Media Temple. Maybe your site just sucks?
Hey Jack, I do have some balls; also, I don’t care about the PUBLIC site being slow, I care about my backend stalling… now, the backend — my MT backend — is fine…
And yes, my site does, indeed, suck!
Chris, I was almost taken in by MT marketing…it sounded too good to be true. I’m glad that I found sites like yours. Now I’m noticing that other ISPs are have grid server offerings, such as:
http://servepath.com/dedicated-servers/grid-servers/index.htm
Any thoughts on this new phenomenon?
I think it was all led by Google and Amazon. The trend is based on a need for an affordable hosting solution that can be slashdotted.
Most people can’t afford a dedicated server but also don’t want to go offline if and when they receive a front-page digg.
That’s what grid server hosting companies need to offer. Anyone who signs up for a service like Media Temple’s Grid Server is going to be that guy: geeky site that periodically gets loads of traffic, many of whom have been kicked off of other virtual hosts, Virtual Private Server, and others.
Really, now that this blog pays out about a grand/month in revenue, I can afford a dedicated server now, but I have been kicked off loads of servers, that’s for sure.
Also, I wish that the IT staff at MT might have taken a little interest. My site was amazingly poorly optimized for one reason, which I didn’t consider: my Movable Type install is “burned” out to static files — so it is a flat-file site; that said, the simple search form is a resource-intensive Perlscript that very literally being run incessantly! The site was constantly being attacked because search engines got a hold of the search URL and used the URL as a indexed destination, so the “flat file” site was a pig.
And then I discovered Fast Search and now everything is so good, so fast, and I can keep my resource requirements down to a sane “1.”
One thing I realized about Media Temple is that, aside from the terrible customer service, deceitful promises, and unwillingness to say sorry and make amends, is that they were promising first and then trying to figure out the tech after: in other words, they were learning while we were paying. MT didn’t have a lot of things sorted out: stats packages were often broken, they didn’t have MySQL sorted out on the Grid (and this is an RDBMS world)… it was a beta service in a production world.
That said, kudos for taking a chance on a new method and to Media Temple for taking a chance on the Grid Computing. But I don’t want that shit being sorted out on my time. On my dime.
When I talked to the director of customer service, Andrew admitted that the initial sales literature was misleading and did a some over-promising. What the hell does that mean? I don’t care — keep your promotional materials in check and your sales force in line because you, Andrew, need to be responsible for the promises you make, even if it is just the spirit of the thing.
That kind of promised Media Tempe was making attracted everyone like me: people who were too cheap or too poor to go for a dedicated server but who were too bid and too heavy and too expensive and too popular for either a Virtual Hosting plan or a Virtual Private Server — you got us, the abusers. And like the Pied Piper, you knew just the right tune to attract all of us Internet rats: the big blogs in small ponds.
At the end of the day, I called and emailed and begged for your help and support, and I stated in Media Temple Doesn’t Care About Its Customers, it took a long blog entry in this very amazingly surprisingly influential blog, Chris Abraham – Because the Media is the Message, to get a reply from Andrew, the Director of Customer Service.
I just needed to be heard; I just needed to get some customer service; I just needed a win-win solution.
And, to be honest, that’s all I really needed, don’t we all.