Over the years, I’ve used a lot of different web hosts, including Dreamhost, GoDaddy and – since 2008 – Media Temple, who I’ve found to be the best by far.
For a bit of background, here’s a quick comparison of MT compared with the two other most recent hosting companies I’ve used, GoDaddy and Dreamhost.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy shared hosting doesn’t provide the resources needed for large websites, and their dedicated server option (which I tried for three months) has a clunky admin panel that leaves you to do all the security updates and maintain the server.
That’s not something I want to spend time doing. I’d rather create content than turn into a systems administrator.
Dreamhost
Before my short stay with GoDaddy, I was a happy customer of Dreamhost for several years. Then the problems began.
One of the sites I co-own became so popular that it started to run slowly when it had a lot of visitors. Dreamhost support advised me to upgrade to their more powerful Virtual Private Server to fix the problem.
To cut a long and frustrating story short, that didn’t work – the site started to crash daily. It was routinely offline for an hour or more during peak times, losing me AdSense revenue and the remainder of what I jokingly call my hair.
The advice from Dreamhost “support” was to scale up the server memory to a point where the bill would have been over $350 a month.
Nice try, but no thanks.
So I switched to Media Temple.
I just checked my support history. Since 2008, I’ve only needed to contact them six times. Of those, three are regarding actual problems with the service, two are “how to” questions and one is about an admin change to the account.
I’m trying hard to think of something negative to say about them, in the name of a balanced review but I’m stuck. It’s not that things don’t go wrong. They do. But it’s much rarer than with other companies I’ve used and it tends to get fixed quickly.
The only major gripe I have is that managing domains bought through their system is a pain. They need to sort that out (that was one of my support requests).
Other reasons I recommend Media Temple
1. Reliability
No web host can keep your site online 100% of the time but they have the best uptime I’ve seen. Total downtime last month was 1 minute and 34 seconds. Downtime so far this month is a nice fat zero.
2. Support
Open 24 hours, 7 days a week and I’ve never had to wait more than a couple of minutes to talk to someone on the phone.
Tip: if you have a pressing problem, call them rather than use email support as there’s often quite a waiting time for an email response.
3. Hosting Power
The combined page views for all the sites running on my account is not far off a million page views per month. But the account is still only using about one half of its allotted server usage – even though some of the sites send out a lot of image and audio files.
That gives me plenty of room to grow the sites before I need to think about an upgrade.
By the way, I have a standard Grid Server package – not the more expensive dedicated server option. Comparable packages at GoDaddy and Dreamhost don’t even get close.
With Grid Server you’re getting the standard PHP, Perl, Python, & MySQL technologies and as well as One-Click install options for WordPress, Drupal, ZenCart and other open-source platforms.
4. Free Content Distribution Service (CDN)
By storing temporary copies of your site at various locations across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, a content distribution network sends visitors the copy nearest their location. This means much faster loading sites for both visitors and search engines.
Because of that, every site I’ve added to the network has gone up a notch or two in Google results within a month.
Media Temple offers a free and paid version of the CloudFlare content distribution network to customers. The paid version doesn’t offer any features I need, so I’ve always stayed with the free version.
5. Price
The Grid Server package I use costs $20 a month and since I’m also getting a content distribution network that usually costs $20 thrown in, I’m a happy camper.
Unanswered questions? Let me know in the comments and I’ll answer as best I can.
Update: I’ve grabbed a discount for you. Use this coupon code – mtaffiliate – and you’ll get 10% off all MT services (gs, dv, and ve). This is a recurring coupon, so it applies every month.
mt_Drew - August 13, 2012
Thanks for the great review. We are happy to hear you are happy with (mt) Media Temple. As you know, we are here 24/7, so let us know if you ever need help with anything.
Drew J
Social Media Team
@MediaTemple
Caimin - August 14, 2012
No problem, Drew. Thanks for the great service.
Nicholas - September 21, 2012
Thanks for this article, glad to see someone not fully focused on cheapest price and “unlimited” slogans in their review. As a growing web design company we’ve been referred to media temple by a few colleagues. They never really explained why other than stating mt had a no nonsense approach. Your detailed experience gave me some perspective as we’re thinking of switching hosting providers. Hostgator has been a little too spotty in their service for us and it looks like mt would fix most of our problems
Caimin - September 21, 2012
Hi Nicholas,
Glad this helped.
One thing I left out of the post is that MT have a site moving service to make switching hosts easier – especially if you have a lot of content, many websites or just prefer to let someone else handle that kind of headache.
Haven’t used it myself but I’ve heard good things about it.
Karl Steinmann - December 21, 2012
Hey Caimin!
Thanks for the informative and helpful info. I’ve been on a similar sojourn myself. I was with Hostgator for a long, long time. Loved it – until I got into WordPress for all my sites. HG will tell you they are not experts on WP, and that’s an understatement. Once I had sites with lots of plugins and lots of traffic, things started to go very, very wrong. I was up to a $250/mo. dedicated server (having migrated up through every single level of hosting they have) and still having problems that were bad enough that at least once a month they had to reboot my server for me. I mean… yikes! And we’re NOT talking major-huge traffic here, either. Just good, steady traffic with the occasional spike.
I was maxxing out on ram and everything else, and still having problems! I eventually figured out it was certain WP plugins in certain configurations. But HG was no help along the way, and really couldn’t help, due to the fact that they are using the old server technologies which just aren’t up to the task.
Having had enough of paying a king’s ransom for what was, essentially, crappy hosting and no real support (again… “We don’t know WordPress”) I went looking for a solution. I found GoDaddy’s new WordPress hosting. It’s actually pretty good. I don’t mind telling you I’ve had fewer problems with GD than with HG, at 1/50th the price! Seriously.
But there’s one major drawback. GD hosting is SLOW. I mean, if you’re on a shared plan (which is what I’m on currently), it can take 5-10 seconds sometimes to load a site, even a simple one. Not good. To be fair, sometimes the sites are snappy. But other times they are not. And good page load speed is not optional – it is a requirement. Cloudflare helps, but not enough to make up for the deficiencies of GD’s system.
So, having decided that I needed *real* quality hosting that understands WP and spikes and can provide fast loading at a reasonable price, I began looking once again. WPEngine is out – too expensive! WP itself recommends several companies, including Dreamhost. Having looked at them all, I was almost ready to go with DH when I found your article and others. It sure seems as if DH is lacking too, despite some laudable things it does. I have NO DESIRE to repeat the Hostgator experience.
I’m now leaning heavily towards MT and The Grid, in part due to your post. Thanks, man! Good stuff. You may have saved a life… ;-)
Caimin - January 3, 2013
Glad to have helped. Thanks for taking the time to add your experiences, I’m sure it’ll help some one else.
Funny that Hostgator don’t seem to want to help people with WordPress – it’s only the most popular publishing platform in the world.
Thanks again for your comment, Karl.
Isiah - January 7, 2013
Thanks for the balanced review.
I’m currently running a site with increasing traffic that means increasing bandwidth useage (and costs).
Looking at the MT (gd) hosting package as a solution, but I’m finding their GPU measurement system a bit baffling.
I have a 500-page non-WP site with around 800-1200 visitors per day – would I exceed my GPU quota with that?
I have also heard their grid system was sluggish – but I think those problems stem from large databases – which I don’t have – would I be right?
Cheers
I
Caimin - January 10, 2013
Hi Isiah,
I think you’d be well within the allowed 2000 GPUs per month. On my account, through various websites, there are around 500,000 page views from around 250,000 visitors per month. With that, GPU usage is just under 500 GPUs a month.
These are WordPress based websites, the largest of which has a bit of over 200 pages / posts.
Hope this helps.
Isiah - January 10, 2013
Brilliant, thanks for the reply.
Evan - May 3, 2013
Thanks for the detailed review. I am shopping around for website hosts and was eying Dreamhost because I had a few people recommend it but I saw a lot of negative reviews on the web. I thought it might have just been because they were using the shared host option, but I see with your review that even with the dedicated host option, there are still problems.
Media Temple definitely sounds like a better option. I’d rather pay the extra $5 / month and have a site that I can count on if it ends up getting a ton of traffic than pay only $15 (I was really just considering the dedicated host option with Dreamhost) and have it not be reliable.)
You say you only had six support requests since 2008. Out of curiosity, how long has that been? I don’t see a date stamp on this post of yours explaining when you wrote it.
Caimin - May 4, 2013
Hi Evan,
Thanks for your comment. The post was written in August 2012. I’m still with MT and have only added one extra support request since then, related to switching credit cards for billing, rather than a service issue.
Evan - May 9, 2013
Hi Caimin,
Thanks, this is good to know. That’s pretty minimal. Do you know which cluster your site is hosted on within MT? I’ve done a fair amount of looking up of reviews and have seen a lot of people talking about issues with Cluster 2 who are using MT hosting.
Thanks,
Evan
Caimin - May 10, 2013
Hi Evan,
We’re on cluster 3. The MT support system only sends notifications that relate to your own server / cluster, so I can’t really comment on cluster 2. I know that when Grid Server was first launched it was a bit of a bumpy ride for a while, maybe the comments you saw relate to that time.
That was before I moved my sites to Media Temple, so I can only say that so far I’ve been really happy with the decision to more here.
Evan - May 14, 2013
Thanks again for the feedback. I’m about 90% sure that I’m going to go with MediaTemple when I get around to building my website. The only other host I’m tempted by is asmallorange, but MediaTemple seems like a much better deal when comparing similarly priced plans as far as space and bandwidth they offer.
I’ve subscribed for the MediaTemple outage RSS feed, so if they start getting a flood of downtime, I may re-evaluate later on, but so far it looks pretty reasonable.
Caimin - May 15, 2013
No worries, let me know if you need more info.