MediaTemple GS Customers Beware Site Down for 23 hours

UPDATE May 20th, 2008:  this has been resolved completely.  A new post has been made.  See:
MediaTemple GS update.

We currently have sites hosted on 4 different companies Mosso Shared Cluster, Hostgator Shared Server, GoDaddy Shared Server and MediaTemple Grid Server. We have been looking to put everything together in one place, but just have not yet found a one size fits all solution.

Hostgator has been great for a few smaller blogs that don’t get as much traffic as a lot of other blogs. Additionally installing new ones is quick and their tech support is great – although I can’t say that I’ve really ever had to contact them. They do offer ssh access if you need it for your shared site. If you are planning on using them for a lot of disk space just read the terms – they say that if you have more than 50,000 files on the site, then they will not be backing up your server. In case you did the math for the 600 gigs of disk space you get – thats an average of 12 megs per file.

GoDaddy is currently hosting a SSL enabled blog we run that sells products and that is because when it was hosted on Mosso – it ran so slow people thought the site was down. Ten to fifteen second page load times were common on Mosso with this setup so we moved the site. Normally I just use Godaddy for Domain Registrations and not hosting. But for the price of the one hosting account, I couldn’t refuse. If the performance gets worse than at Mosso, I’ll move the site. GoDaddy has great support and a great refund policy.

Mosso has been the host for this blog and the article directory for the last year – over all – its been an ok experience. At times it was great and everything went very smoothly. At other times its been very rocky and hard to get anything to work. The support staff there has always tried to help to the best that they can. But more often than not the issues I was having were not issues other people were having and usually it was due to the script that runs the article directory. However a few months ago they announced a request based billing system – so it is no longer a cost effective solution.

MediaTemple – we moved a site to their grid service after looking for a new host for some of our sites that are currently on mosso. The first site we moved is much smaller than ArticleSnatch and the guys in sales said oh that won’t be a problem just put it on the grid service and you will be all set. Moving the site and the database over was cake – with the SSH access you get to the machine. This alone was a huge plus compared to mosso. So we moved the one site over and about 3 days later, got an email saying that it had exceeded the MySql shared resources and would be bumped into a capacity system for a few days. Then I got the same email again after it came out of the capacity system. So I just bought a 256meg mysql container for the site – thus doubling the hosting bill for $40/month.

Thing have been relatively smooth at Mediatemple until yesterday (see below). The GPU usage (their form of monitoring CPU time) has been about 1/3 of what you get included for the month. Overall it works pretty well. It is slower to respond than the site hosted at Mosso, but no request based billing. As for support, most times I’ve called in I was on hold for an average of 15 minutes. One time it said I would be on hold for 50 minutes – I hung up. Seems that morning is the best time to call.

Yesterday – about 24 hours ago – I noticed that the site started giving a 403 error. At first I thought that I broke something in the .htaccess file, so I open up FTP. It won’t let me connect. So I check the system status – it says intermittent speed issues. So I called support, was told it would be 30 minutes to wait, so I hung up. I put in a ticket instead. I got a reply a few minutes later saying “The issue you have reported has been identified by (mt) Media Temple as possibly being part of a wider problem affecting more than one customer. An internal incident (INC# 393) has been opened to track the issue and to provide you collective updates as progress is made toward a resolution.” She also included a link to the status site above. Ok great – nothing to do so I forgot about it.

This morning I check the site – still down. So I call MediaTemple – this time only 6 people in line. I speak to a customer support rep who says that he will have an admin look into it. When they were moving people, my site was supposedly moved to the new location (or so they thought). But the files never made it. Thus explaining why I can’t even ftp to the site. So he said that it would be resolved shortly and he put in a ticket. That was 8 hours ago and it still is not resolved. If you review the status site from today – it seems they have been very busy over there they have even made a whole category for this incident.

So where do we stand now – well – we certainly won’t host anything critical at mediatemple. But going forward I think for the $40/month we pay we will be seeking an alternative host for that site. I’ve been looking at Joyent and several others. As for the sites we host at mosso, we are looking for a dedicated / colocated server to run the site so that we will have a lot more control over what scripts can be used, etc.

Want to help? Know a great host – please let me know!
Have you had similar or opposite experiences with these hosts? feel free to comment below. Remember when commenting – use your name not a keyword.

UPDATE 5/14/2008 8pm: After 25 hours of total downtime – the site is back up.

UPDATE 5/15/2008 9am: I received an email that mediatemple is crediting my account with 3 months service due to the downtime.

UPDATE 5/15/2008 1:30pm: The site is down again – and I can’t even login to the FTP client again. I called tech support – wait time estimated of 25 minutes.

UPDATE 5/20/2008: See updated post.