MediaTemple Performance
Posted February 23rd, 2007 @ 01:19pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm absolutely livid with MediaTemple currently. LIVID. For the past two weeks, my server - which hosts a vBulletin forum, two popular blogs (with caching enabled), and a few other little piddly sites that are lucky to get 1000 hits per day.
I'm hosting with the $50 (dv)Base plan, and despite a month and a half of fairly adequate performance, in the past two weeks I find that I'm constantly running out of memory. MySQL throws up errors. Apache drops connections. Even FTP uploads don't go through. I'm seeing server loads of 12 despite the fact that the server hung out in the 0.3 to 0.8 range for most of January and February.
Despite promises of a MediaTemple user forum - promises that led me to take down a site I'd started building for that very purpose - from executives within MediaTemple, nothing has come to fruition yet. The company seems to have a problem with promises, in fact. The (dv) 3.0 plan was promised in October but wasn't available until early January, and only then if users signed up new accounts or chose to spend hours migrating their own sites.
I'm very, very quickly becoming displeased with MediaTemple. Their support has been responsive, but the fact that I've needed so much support just to run a few sites of late does not reflect well on them.
I've recommended MediaTemple in the past, but as of now, that will no longer be the case, as I am once again back to paying far too much for far too little.
One Response to "MediaTemple Performance"
Posted 03 Apr 2007 at 9:12pm #
I feel your pain. At first, everything was good with the (dv)2.0. This, of course, came after a jumped off the (gs) ship. Then came (dv)3.0 which made me even happier. I've noticed though, over the past month, the server access has been lagging. FTP access was always uncomfortably slow, but just today I started paying attention to server ping times. They average about 97ms and the packet loss is 25%! I am not making this up. Now, I am located in Annapolis, MD, but does that mean I have to settle for crappy hosting quality because I am 3000 miles away? Anyway, I just sent out a support request, but it feels more like a bug report. The problem is not with my (dv)3.0 server, it's with MEDIATEMPLE. Type the following into a windows command prompt and see what you get: "ping -n 20 mediatemple.net". I also did a tracert on mediatemple and found that the Los Angeles hops are SERIOUSLY LAGGING which means, in theory, that anyone outside California would see poor server response when trying to access ANYTHING hosted on MediaTemple's servers.
Bah! On a side note, I looked into hosting on my own Verizon Fios at home, but I found out that Verizon crippled this possibility for residential users by blocking inbound connections to port 80 and 443(I think). Great. So I have to pay a minimum of $99/month to get a dedicated IP and 15Mbps down / 2 Mbps up. To be honest, though, this would actually be a SIGNIFICANTLY faster connection than what I get with MediaTemple right now. Plus, I would already be AT the server.
Why don't they just come out and say, "If you want reliable hosting, you're going to have to pay $A,NAR,MAN,DAL.EG!"
GRRR!