Posted on Tuesday, 11th March 2008 by Shaun Kester
This is definitely a rant against web hosting…
As some of you know, I have servers all over the place. My LAMP stuff is either with Media Temple or hosted on a Liquid Web server. Now here is my problem.
Media Temple will be down this Friday for several hours. This time around we have some warning, but I’ve been experiencing timeouts and general unavailability for weeks now. Some of these problems (mt) has owned up to, most they haven’t. When my sites are available, the time it takes to load a page is unacceptable. Any PHP/mySQL scripts you have will take 3-12 seconds to load. I pay an extra $20 per month for a mySQL container to alleviate these kinds of problems. For $37/month I’m getting good resources but poor availability and a very slow response time.
Liquid Web isn’t making me any happier right now. I pay $30/month for my reseller account that is hosted on a Liquid Web server. Response times for identical installs, compared to (mt), is sub second. No waiting, no timeouts, no problems. In fact, I’m moving a lot of my sites to that system because I am tired of clients complaining about how slow (mt) is and recent outages. Today LiquidWeb says they are under a DDOS. This is a strange response to me because I can get to all of their sites and mine from Comcast, just not Qwest. I’ve noted such in a discussion at WHT, “Is LiquidWeb down?“. I SSH’d into my (mt) account and can get to the LW servers just fine too. WTH Qwest? Liquid Web?
Grrrr! What does it take to have a website that stays up? Anybody? How hard is it to take some money from me, let me put my files up there, and host them in a reliable, high performance, secure environment? All told I’m spending $67/month for my hosts and they are making me frustrated. Maybe I should try Dreamhost <bg>…
Posted in Rants and Raves | Comments (10)
March 11th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
I’m very sorry for the problem today, it was a very rare event for us and it didn’t affect all customers. We are providing a large credit over and above our SLA to the 5%, or so, of our customer base that was affected. I’m really sorry about the problem today, check out the WHT thread you linked to above if you’d like a more detailed explanation of what happened.
Travis Stoliker
liquidweb.com
March 13th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Hey Shaun,
Which host is this site running on now? (and which plan if you don’t mind being more specific) I like it - it’s fast. I’m considering Liquidweb, but didn’t see the $30 reseller account that you mentioned. My current hosts MySQL performance is abysmal and I’m looking for one that can handle either WordPress or sNews with ease.
March 13th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
SKFox.com is hosted on Media Temple’s Grid Service. It can be fast, but even with the extra $20/month mySQL container, my Liquid Web reseller is much faster. There is a certain latency with Media Temple sometimes. PHP timers will report that the script took anywhere from .3 seconds to 16 seconds to run. It is inconsistent just enough to be very frustrating. Despite that, I’ve stayed with them because their custom control panel is awesome, support is good, community is helpful, and it is something different then the thousands of hosts out there that don’t distinguish themselves at all in this very crowded market.
March 15th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Thank you for the info Shaun. Interesting approach Media Temple has taken. I think either the Grid service + mySQL container or a managed VPS will suit my needs.
March 15th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
u cant find the reseller hosting cuz he is a client of magicshosting.net which i have our servers at liquidweb
all in in all shaun our servers uptime been FAR more then perfect till now.. so we cant hate on them too much
~Brian
March 15th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Good point Brian. The performance to date has been excellent, but when I wrote this blog post I was in the middle of a very large migration from (mt) and it simply could not have been timed more inconveniently.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I moved all of my sites from Media Temple from Slicehost about 9 months ago and I couldn’t be happier with the service. I did not MT’s grid service.
April 27th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
I’ve been with Media Temple for about 8 months and it’s been fairly unstable the entire time. My site went down 3 different times on Saturday for example. I run an external monitor to ensure availability and unfortunately, I’m only seeing about 98% uptime right now.
The worst part is that for about 10% of the time, the site loads very slowly. I wrote more with some details on my blog:
http://www.jimgoings.com/2008/04/media-temple-kills-my-inner-child/
May 1st, 2008 at 6:27 am
Hi there,
Dreamhost doesn’t seem to be a good choice too. I had tried them for 3 months, and their LAMP performance is unacceptable. Finally, i got hostgator which works pretty fast, but becareful of their security protection, as my site got hacked not too long ago.
June 24th, 2008 at 10:06 am
I’ve also been very happy with Slicehost. If you’re totally comfortable with SSH or console root access on a bare distro installation then Slicehost is a great way to go. They don’t try to make it easy for you by pre-installing control panels… they use totally stock distros.
In my experience, the uptime has been noticeably better than MediaTemple’s. In the last month I’ve been unable to get HTTP access to the server on MediaTemple twice, and have been unable to SSH to it twice as well (different times). No such problems with Slicehost. Slicehost appears to be doing everything right, but you have to know your stuff to be able to use them.
In their FAQ, they have a question “Will this be too hard?”. The answer is “maybe”. I like their honesty.