MediaTemple (MT) is one of the most popular grid hosting service providers. They were one of the first companies to offer grid hosting and today host over 200,000 websites.
With a starting price of $20 per month, MediaTemple charges way less that competitors like Rackspace Cloud(Mosso). MediaTemple offers shared hosting (Grid Service – GS) as well as virtual dedicated hosting (Dedicated Virtual – DV) starting from $50 per month.
Compared to traditional shared hosting, grid hosting has the advantage of being able to easily manage traffic spikes. Sudden increase in traffic, for example getting listed in Digg or other other social networking sites, doesn't create any problem for sites hosted with grid hosting providers.
MediaTemple Network and
Datacenter Review
MediaTemple own and operate tow Tier4 data centers, on each in Ashburn, Virginia and El Segundo, California. Both are huge, state of the art, with redundant connectivity and all required security systems in place. MT is a well established company and are pretty reliable.
Still there used to be outages, mostly planned that used to keep sites down for hours. We also experienced sites running very slow occasionally and sometimes even scripts getting timed out in the shared hosting platform.
But the fact is, during last couple of years Media Temple improved their storage architecture and now even big names like Qantas, Adobe etc. trust them for their hosting needs.
MediaTemple Server
management
The grid service(GS) plans are similar to the shared hosting plans and will not need any server management skills. DV plans will need the user to manage his server.
Grid service is a totally different platform, so the control panel etc. doesn't look exactly like any well known products. New users might find it confusing to add new sub domain and edit the A record etc. Below is a screenshot of the control panel showing the functionalities:
As you can see, the control panel powerful and it even allows editing PHP.ini for customized settings. Managing and setting up MySQL database, web mail etc. is simple and straight forward. There is also a script installer that installs popular PHP scripts. But it supports only three scripts, drupal, wordpress and zencart as I write this.
From our experience, control panel is reasonably powerful and okay to use, but definitely not as good as cPanel or other popular control panels.
Overall, server management is not an issue but some web master may need some help in issues like adding a new subdomain etc.
MediaTemple Customer
Support Review
MediaTemple support is known to be reasonably good. 24/7 phone and email support, along with user forums where both the staff and peer group answer the questions. While support staff is known to be friendly and efficient, replies to support tickets are not very fast. While their support panel shows expected response time of 2-3 hours most of the time, our experience showed response times varying from 6 hours to 20 hours. MT on their side, assures reply within 24 hours which is okay.
MediaTemple Pricing
Starting from $20 per month, MT is costlier than traditional shared hosting services. On the other hand, with the ability to handle traffic spikes, MT can perform better than even costlier dedicated servers at times.
Comparing with competition, MT is way cheaper than Rackspace Cloud(Mosso) which starts from $100 per month. Overall with the ability to add up to 100 sites in single account, MediaTemple is value for money.
MediaTemple claims that their basic package (GS) can handle 99% of sites, without exceeding the limits. There is ample amount of space and bandwidth, but the real catch is the resource usage called GPU( Grid Performance Unit ) similar to CPU usage on shared hosting. The GPU usage could exceed the limits for very heavy traffic sites as well as poorly programmed sites. In case the GPU usage exceeds the limit, user might be billed for the additional usage which can be a big amount. So new users with reasonably heavy traffic will need to keep an eye on the GPU usage graph available in the control panel and prorated usage for the month to make sure that there will not be any unpleasant news at the end of the month. Of course, MT will email the user of any heavy usage, but new users will need to be careful as well.
Grid hosting has evolved over the last last couple of years, with better stability and less downtime. Grid / Cloud is a great option for sites that gets affected by traffic spikes on traditional shared hosting. In case of sudden increase in traffic, grid hosting performs better than even a powerful dedicated server. At the moment, MediaTemple is one of the bets options for grid hosting, offering cheaper solutions compared to hosts like Amazon and Rackspace.
However, if your site doesn't expect sudden traffic spikes, sticking on with a good shared host like Hostgator would be a better decision.
Categories
MediaTemple Network and
Datacenter Review 
MediaTemple Server
management
MediaTemple Customer
Support Review 
MediaTemple Offers
Recommendation
