I got a comment spam from Samual Wright which I will excuse because it is interesting, “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 Any thoughts on this new phenomenon?” Well, yes I do, and posted them in comments and here, “I think it [grid computing hosting services] was all led by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and others. The trend is based on a need for an affordable hosting solution that can survive a slashdotting. 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.”
More from my comments over at Closing My Media Temple Grid Server Hosting Plan:
“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.”
