Comments for Grid Server Crushes Shared Hosting? Not Tonight It Didn't...

Grid Server Crushes Shared Hosting? Not Tonight It Didn't...

2007-07-09T09:29:02Z

UPDATE: In discussions with MediaTemple after things had calmed down, we agreed that R/WW is better off on a single tenant server. For all its positive points and innovation, ultimately the Grid is a multi-tentant solution - which when you have a critical asset (as R/WW is for me) is probably not the ideal solution. MediaTemple had actually advised me of that originally, it has to be said. So currently R/WW is in the process of being upgraded to a Dedicated Virtual server.

[original post] Apologies for the site downtime - the MediaTemple Grid Server was down for 2.5 hours tonight, meaning R/WW was unavailable during that entire time. Normally MediaTemple is an outstanding server provider, and their customer service is second to none in my experience. However, I have major concerns about the Grid Server - which was touted so highly on TechCrunch in October 2006. Quoting from Michael Arrington's post at that time:

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"Media Temple launched a major new hosting service this morning called Grid Server. It matches low end shared hosting services in pricing ($20/month) but promises to grow along with the site, manage huge short term traffic spikes without a disruption in service or performance and avoid the ‚Äúbad neighbor‚Ä? problem common with shared hosting services."

It sounds great in theory, but not so grand when your website goes down for 2.5 hours. Unfortunately I have to say I've had more problems with Grid Server than on the Shared Server I was previously on. Again, this is nothing against MediaTemple's customer service, which is generally excellent. But the Grid Server does not seem to be the golden panacea it was said to be when it launched.

Comment from Ali on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T09:59:32Z

I've had issues to with two of my sites that are in development being down. Their customer service is good, but if the service itself doesn't live up then what's the point.

Comment from Ric.List on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T10:04:19Z

I used to thought R/WW have it's own dedicated server.
Why not go with a dedicated server or vps?

Our site have similar questions with another great host privider ***. So we decided to build the server by self. It will centainly take some more effort than shared host. But it's worth of the try.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T10:09:05Z

Well yes, dedicated server is the next logical step. I am disappointed though, because the Grid Server was supposed to be a cost effective scaling solution. As I said, great in theory - but not great if there is regular downtime.

Comment from Tim from bla.st on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T10:15:50Z

I'm using a Virtual server with Media Temple and never had any substantial downtime. It's also a lot snappier at rendering pages than my dual 1GHz dedicated server which I was pleasantly surprised about.

Comment from Matt on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T10:24:09Z

I host multiple sites on the grid and haven't experienced any issues like this yet; fingers crossed. All reports thus far for tracking uptime have never been less than 99%.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T10:56:23Z

Matt, I wish I could say the same. So far my experience has been much less than 99% uptime.

Comment from Stan Schroeder on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T11:00:16Z

With hosting, it's always the same: anything is fine for small projects, but for serious business, you need dedicated hosting. I'm moving to Media Temple's virtual-dedicated these days; not because I've had a lot of downtime (I've had some, though), but because I know no shared or grid hosting will be good enough for my upcoming projects.

Comment from Andy on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T11:51:09Z

What's so hot about MediaTemple that makes all the top blogs and design-type sites use it? As far as I can tell, hosting is hosting and this is just well-marketed with a fancy website ("look, TechCrunch uses us, anyone who's serious should be using MT!").

$20 a month seems a bit steep for low-end shared hosting, as well. I pay ‚Ç¨10 a month with a small Irish provider and you'd never be able to tell it wasn't MediaTemple unless you went and looked in the DNS!

Comment from Brent on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T13:38:41Z

Media Temple's grid server has been an up-and-down disaster for Cogmap with periods of extremely high latency. Having said that, the last few weeks have been a bit better.

Comment from Stan Schroeder on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T13:50:44Z

@Andy: Media Temple's grid server can withstand the Digg and Slashdot effect at once. I had the fortune to test that out. There are probably more web hosting providers who can take that kind of burst traffic for a low price, but Media Temple built their name on this fact and this is the reason why sites which expect occasionally high traffic choose it.

Comment from Dan Grossman on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T17:37:44Z

The Digg and Slashdot effect are nothing. A hit every two seconds at most from a 5000+ digg story. Only the most absurdly oversold server with extremely low resource limits imposed (namely MySQL connections) could possibly be taken down by that.

Comment from Markus on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T18:13:15Z

Don't even get me started on MediaTemple's Grid. If there is a top ten list for biggest FAILURE/dissappointment of 2007 it will surely take the cake.

Their customer service is decent I'll agree but not spectacular. More than once I've had canned replies where it's obvious the staff didn't even fully read my ticket.

The Grid is good for serving static files but anything that requires a database connection.... fuhgettaboutit!

Comment from Carson on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T20:57:45Z

You should give colocation a try before going with dedicated equipment. This may not be true with MT but a lot of dedicated boxes are the cheapest possible desktops the hosting place could find. You may find it less painful to buy a couple decent 1Us from Dell or IBM and then find a good colo for $100 a month.

Comment from sev on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T21:46:23Z

@Markus:
"for serving static files but anything that requires a database connection.... fuhgettaboutit!"

Have you seen their MySQL containers? It‚Äôs a VPS for your database and its cheap considering what you get..not to mention it requires no technical knowledge to get into a container.

Today sucked, but it looks like it wasn't one of their "normal" outages. I think their Bluearcs are acting up again and it's unfortunate that (mt) takes the rap for it. I give them credit for bringing it back up in the middle of a Sunday night.

Comment from Patricia on 2007-07-09

2007-07-10T04:37:40Z

I don't know a lot about the companies you're talking about, but grid computing is getting pretty hot right now. I think there was just an in-stat report that 1 in 4 enterprises are either using it or considering it. Granted, it's based on the number polled, but still. It makes sense.

Expect lots of other players to enter this space, and soon.

Comment from George on 2007-07-10

2007-07-10T08:37:18Z

I also got very excited about "the grid" ... and then very frustrated ... Downtimes are not that frequent but they seem to last a really long time. I had almost 12 hours of downtime a couple of weeks after it launched, and another 6 hours a few weeks ago ... I went back to a "normal" shared hosting, which has been more stable for me. IMO MediaTemple has lost a lot of credibility ... when you hype something so much you're under pressure to deliver and in my view they failed to deliver ...

Comment from Mr K on 2007-08-01

2007-08-02T03:02:46Z

Rackspace all the way baby. Although I have to say I do host my personal sites on the Grid at MT.

My experience with MT is okay, but I much much prefer Rackspace, they were fantastic. We hosted many large scale LAMP solutions with them, and they were fantastic at helping and sorting out issues for us