The “Break it Down” Blog

Some of you may have run into some hickups accessing the site over the last day or so, sorry about that. I moved my hosting off of GoDaddy and onto Media Temple on their Grid Server Plan which is absolutely phenomenal so far.

I got fed up with GoDaddy for a few reasons:

• The management interface is terrible and a mish-mash of controls. They *just* rolled out a new UI though, it seemed alright.
• They put universal “flood” restrictions on all sites hosted on their shared hosting so if an IP address makes too many connections in a set amount of time, it doesn’t just throttle them, it blocks them for up to 10 minutes. Not too much of a problem right? How about if you are trying to download backups of your site… jesus that was frustrating. Took me 4 hours to finish, I would get 10 files, then get banned and have to retry in 5-10mins and continue. I finally helped to work around the problem by throttling my FTP client at 5 KB/sec, you didn’t read that wrong, I’m talking dial-up speed, just to get the site to stop banning me.
• Performance is completely hit-or-miss depending on the time of day you hit the site.

Then you take a look at Media Temple, who I would consider to be the SmugMug of the hosting industry, and here is your control panel:

And here is me with 1 scheduled backup and then manually making a new backup of the site after I was done configuring everything:

Everything is AJAX-enabled, all custom code and totally refined. There are little touches all over the place that make you go “Oh nice!”. Like when I was registering, and I filled out the “Referrer” information, it automatically pops up a help box only while you are editing the fields to let you know what they are asking for. So if you never edit the fields, all that help stays hidden.

Then you have your 1-Click Applications and Backup Management that is all part of the deal and it’s a dream come true. I got Wordpress back up and running along with weekly scheduled backups in like 30 seconds.

Some more nice touches added to the site:

• Performance is much improved
• Increased disk space and bandwidth
• New “Subscribe to comments” feature for posts that you are interested in, you will get emailed when new comments arrive.
• Easily upgradable server by adding more “grids” AFACT
• Newest stable releases of software supported and installed (PHP, Perl, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• root-like access/control over your Grid without SSH login and all from a nice Web UI that finally isn’t retarded.
• Excellent Help/FAQ system that supports ratings on the answers to help give strong indications of how valuable those articles are
• 24/7 1-800 support where you can talk to a human being

I hope you all enjoy it, and thanks for the continued support!

Update #1: Ok this is getting too cool now. I just turned SSH access on, on my account, and the GS server even run Subversion. This is like a VPS but 1/2 the price… I love it.