The “Break it Down” Blog

I was checking out N. Design Studio’s blog to see what’s going on with his theme designs (Note: He designed this theme) and noticed he had blog entry up about finding a new host. Surprisingly enough he’s already on MediaTemple and has outages frequently or problems with his dedicated-VPS.

As you know this blog is currently on MediaTemple as well and when I first moved over I had my fair share of problems. The solution, from MediaTemple’s point of view seems to have been to (free? They tried to charge me yet) enable a $20/month feature on my account for the time being. So now my $40/month MediaTemple account is performing just how my $3.50/GoDaddy account was. I will say that the MediaTemple management console is fantastic. It’s very nicely laid out with easy controls for just about anything you’d like to get done.

I also have to point out that the integrated functionality in the (gs) servers from MediaTemple has been awesome from a developer’s point of view. For example, out of the box I have Subversion installed on the account and was able to quickly set it up and use it with Eclipse for projects.

Looking at Nick’s requirements for a host, you could see why a VPS might not cut it:

• 500,000+ visitors/month
• 2+ million pageviews/month
• 500GB+ bandwidth/month

Ouch. At that point I think you are looking at a dedicated box. He did mention 3 other hosts he’s looking into, here they are for reference:

1. Slicehost
Collis at FreelanceSwitch recommends Slicehost to me. They seem to handle WordPress and Digg effect very well. FreelanceSwitch got dugg several times and able to survive without any downtime. However, the waiting list to sign up at Slicehost is between 2 to 12 weeks.

2. Mosso
Uneasysilence switched from Media Temple to Mosso and it has been very stable. Mosso uses their “clustering technology routes each site request to not just one server, but through an army of load balanced IIS and Apache webservers.” Everything sounds too good for just $100/month. Has anyone tried their services?

3. Servint
I found Servint through some hosting forums. I have very little information about Servint and would like to hear your inputs.

After looking at Slicehost I’ll admit, my interest was peaked. They reminded me a lot of RimuHosting who I had fairly sluggish response times with (they had just started up, and had a NY data center, but their new one in Dallas is supposedly faster) but excellent/knowlegable customer service support. Each person I talked to wasn’t a CS rep, but rather one of the techs that worked on-sight, so he knew exactly what was going on.

Anyway, wanted to include that link here for folks and give it some exposure. Finding a good host is something like 40% luck and 60% good company/good hardware. You can find negative AND positive comments on every single hosting company online. So far my longer-term impressions of MediaTemple are good and I plan on staying put unless there were some reason for me to leave. I like that upgrading as my account grows is easy to accommodate and I get to keep this wonderful management interface.