Mark Boulton

30 Responses to “Moving over to a new Grid Server”

1. 
   Kurt Trew said on: November 6th, 2006 at 1:49 pm

   I’ve never seen/heard of Media Temple, but it’s a pretty good price for such a good pack­age, eh? Good luck with the move and hope you enjoy your new home!

2. 
   Phil said on: November 6th, 2006 at 1:49 pm

   Let us know how you find MT, Mark! Saw the Grid Server a few weeks ago, and it sounds superb for $20 per month. Can I ask how you, and oth­ers, feel about host­ing on US serv­ers? Am I right in think­ing Google will place your site in the rel­ev­ant coun­try search res­ults based on the server loc­a­tion (ie I have a site hos­ted in the UK, Google will tag it as a UK site)?

3. 
   Myles Eftos said on: November 6th, 2006 at 2:21 pm

   Hi Mark,

   I just made the move to MT for a Rails app I’ve built — seems pretty good, although the $20 plan can really only run one Rails app at a time. 

   The traffic and disk space alloc­a­tion is pretty great though :) 

   Myles

4. 
   George said on: November 6th, 2006 at 2:34 pm

   I’ve been on a (dv) plan since Janu­ary with MT. I’m UK based and they have been great. Email sup­port is great and the ser­vice has been very sat­is­fact­ory. They have their repu­ta­tion for a reason.

5. 
   Rogier said on: November 6th, 2006 at 2:56 pm

   I heard many pos­it­ive com­ments about the new grid server of MT, good choice! Although it’s not guar­an­teed that your site won’t go off­line when you’re being dugg: http://www.digg.com/hardware/Digg_Proof_Shared_Hosting_From_Media_Temple_Let_s_Find_Out

6. 
   Gerard @ Interweb World said on: November 6th, 2006 at 3:06 pm

   Mark: I’m doing exactly the same thing, I’m about mid-way through the pro­cess right now. Dream­hosts per­form­ance of late has been embar­rass­ing, and I’ve had com­plaints that my sites have been slow or unavail­able for too long now. 

   Slightly sad to be leav­ing Dream­host, but the level of atten­tion from Media Temple so far more than makes up for it!

7. 
   Nate K said on: November 6th, 2006 at 3:17 pm

   I have been on my cur­rent host for a while now. Part of the reason I haven’t updated the look/feel is because of the offer­ings of my cur­rent host. I want the abil­ity to use PHP5 instead of 4, and also want the abil­ity to develop Rails apps. Those two things alone have brought me to the point of switch­ing to MT. I will be switch­ing mine in the next month or so, and then begin build­ing my site to be what I want it to be (instead of a default wordpress…ha). 

   Through research, and talk­ing with oth­ers who are using MT, I have found it to be the best and most afford­able option. 

   Let us know how you like it! :)

8. 
   Dio said on: November 6th, 2006 at 4:25 pm

   I recently got my money refun­ded from Dream­host (which will have killed your refer­ral fee sorry) as I was really hacked off with ‘em. I sat in a web­mas­ters chat chan­nel one night, and lots of people were com­plain­ing about their sites being down. 

   This happened a few times, and we were all on Dream­host. I moved out — first time I’ve ever got a refund on host­ing. just as well it was 97 days refund period! 

   As for the host­ing thing. If you host a co.uk in the US, you’ll show up in the UK only search at Google. If you host a .com in the US, you won’t even if the con­tent is UK spe­cific. If you phys­ic­ally host the .com in the UK (if you fancy pay­ing through the nose) then it will show up in the UK only searches.

9. 
   Ryan said on: November 6th, 2006 at 4:25 pm

   I am plan­ning on doing the same thing. I really liked dream­host, but this sum­mer was a roller­coaster ride that I don’t want to take again… 

   Plus, I have used MT for over a year now (for some of my per­sonal domains) and I have never had a prob­lem with them — their cus­tomer ser­vice is the best in the biz.

10. 
    Colly said on: November 6th, 2006 at 5:03 pm

    Noth­ing wrong with MT — been host­ing with them (albeit on a DV PHP server) for four years. You can pick up the phone any time and speak to an Amer­ican — it is like talk­ing to the Inter­net itself! 

    Email sup­port can be a little slow, but at least the out­comes are good.

11. 
    brad said on: November 6th, 2006 at 5:29 pm

    So what do they mean by a tera­byte of “short path band­width?” That’s the only thing that makes me a bit leery; other host­ing ser­vices talk about band­width but MT talk about “short path band­width” limits.

    This does look like a fant­astic deal, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that I’m pay­ing $20/month for only 100 mega­bytes of disk space, although that does come with 15 gigs/month of band­width. I was con­sid­er­ing switch­ing to TextDrive since that will be bundled with the new Joy­ent Core and I already use Strong­Space, but they only offer 5 gigs/month band­width for their base pack­age ($15/month) and that’s pretty paltry. But before I switch to MT I want to see if there’s some hid­den catch in this “short path band­width” business.

12. 
    reese said on: November 6th, 2006 at 5:49 pm

    I’m think­ing of mov­ing to MT, too. The only thing that turns me off a bit is mov­ing about 8 domains (some of them cli­ents) over there. I don’t know if people will be alto­gether happy at being down for up to two days for pro­pog­a­tion, and I don’t know if I’m up to switch­ing all their info to be ip-based tem­por­ar­ily to pre­vent it ;) 

    I’ve heard very good things about media temple, though, and that grid plan looks excel­lent. I think I’d sleep bet­ter at night with it.

13. 
    Richard said on: November 6th, 2006 at 6:18 pm

    Phil: I’ve hos­ted with Media Temple for ages now, and them being in the US in no way gets infront of reciev­ing top notch ser­vice. Dio men­tioned the Google thing earlier. 

    But the top thing that impresses me the host is just how shiny everything is (if you know what I mean) — the cp inter­faces are nice to work with, and they respond to sup­port requests online in about 30 minutes usu­ally (unless it’s urgent). 

    I’d definately recom­mend (mt).

14. 
    David Horn said on: November 6th, 2006 at 6:40 pm

    Have been very happy with MT for the past 18 months — I’ve migrated 3 sites over to the grid so far … how­ever, and unfor­tu­nately, on my per­sonal (busi­ness) site I’m migrat­ing right now and it’s been down for almost 12 hours and not a word out of sup­port.  Other than today’s per­sonal melt­down, they’ve been excel­lent for 18 months though.

15. 
    Scott said on: November 6th, 2006 at 11:17 pm

    Brad — My best guess about “Short Path Band­width” is that they mean it doesn’t route through a lot of net­work equip­ment before it gets out to the inter­net at large.  I’m not sure on this (at all) but I’m guess­ing they’re men­tion­ing it as a bene­fit, rather than a catch.  Per­haps they felt the need to qual­ify because of their clustered architecture.

16. 
    Laurie H. said on: November 7th, 2006 at 12:02 am

    Good luck with the move.  If it doesn’t work out for you, I’d recom­mend Argos Net­works(http://www.argosweb.net).  In my day job I man­age 7 Web sites, one of which is pretty good size.  I’ve used Argos Net­works for more than 7 year, and have been very happy with the ser­vice and tech­nical expert­ise. I usu­ally get some kind of reply within 30 minutes of a trouble-shooting call.  You can’t beat that for service.

17. 
    Sherry said on: November 7th, 2006 at 12:43 am

    Nice site!
    
    My homepage | Please visit

18. 
    Chuck Cheeze said on: November 7th, 2006 at 6:45 am

    David Horn– Just pick up the phone and call them– they will have your trans­fer done in a mat­ter of minutes.  I’ve had 2 sites with MT (after leav­ing DH fromt he insanely bad down­time in the sum­mer) for about 4 months and both moved flaw­lessly to the grid about 2 weeks ago. 

    The phone sup­port is nor­mally top notch– never on hold more than a couple of minutes.  Usu­ally they can fix what ails you right away.  Some­times I feel that they are a bit non­chal­ant about some things that they don’t see an explan­a­tion for.  The only catch I have seen is about 5 times I have had small issues like a weird spam mes­sage keep­ing mes­sages from down­load­ing over POP– and I call them to ask if they can find a prob­lem in the queue or some­thing, and they say everything looks fine, and not 2 minutes later things start flow­ing– almost like they see some­thing they can do and do it while I’m on the phone, then say everything is work­ing fine, and i see it start work­ing almost imme­di­ately.  I know it sounds weird but its been like 5 times so i am a little sus­pi­cious.  But the fact is they are respons­ive and their host­ing just works.

19. 
    Flat said on: November 7th, 2006 at 10:39 am

    Its a good call. 

    Its amaz­ing how much db space you need for websites.. 

    you can mir­ror the site in a cache so that an access isn’t via your db.. 

    digg has an art­icle about being dugg.

20. 
    3stripe said on: November 7th, 2006 at 11:51 am

    Inter­st­ing, I’ve been pon­der­ing the exact same move myself… Dream­host is a wee bit ropey at the moment for my liking!

21. 
    Steve Williams said on: November 7th, 2006 at 7:49 pm

    Here’s look­ing for­ward to a more reli­able, faster load­ing Mark Boulton Experience :)

22. 
    Kyle Talbott said on: November 8th, 2006 at 2:08 am

    (mt) has been my host for over 5 years. My migra­tion to the grid took 1 day, but I was already on there servers. 

    They have the best cus­tomer ser­vice. Friendly, informed and help­ful. I’ve only had 1 prob­lem once and when I brought it to their atten­tion they were promptly gra­cious, and addressed the issue. 

    Long live (mt) and their great service.

23. 
    David Hughes said on: November 8th, 2006 at 4:55 pm

    I’m also think­ing of mov­ing to the Grid Plan from 1and1 who frankly suck! 

    I’m also think­ing of mov­ing to Expres­sion Engine from Tex­t­pat­tern — any­body know if this will work OK with the Grid?  I assume yes but it’s not on the list of sup­por­ted apps. 

    Many thanks

24. 
    Mark said on: November 9th, 2006 at 2:00 am

    I made the moveback to (mt) and have been 100% pleased.

25. 
    EEUser said on: November 9th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

    MT sup­port has stated, in one of the many threads around, that they have been using/testing EE on the (gs). It works, and why shouldn’t it? If you like EE, have a look at Code­Igniter, too.

26. 
    Pete Callaway said on: November 9th, 2006 at 1:53 pm

    +1 strug­gling Dream­host sub­scriber now con­sid­er­ing MT 

    BTW, you may want to update the side­panel from “Host­ing from Dreamhost” ;) 

    Cheers,
    
    Pete

27. 
    budparr said on: November 12th, 2006 at 1:26 am

    As an EE user I’ll be inter­ested to know how your exper­i­ence goes there. I have a bunch of installs — on the shared server, grid server and ded­ic­ated vir­tual — and each one needed a dif­fer­ent tweak here or there to get going — I’m hop­ing the grid setup, which runs php as a cgi pro­cess, as more consistent.

28. 
    Mark Boulton said on: November 14th, 2006 at 10:30 am

    Well, everything is up and run­ning well on the new serv­ers now. EE is behav­ing well — no prob­lems at all with the migra­tion. DNS was a bit shabby though and took a good couple of days to sort itself out.

29. 
    Geof Harries said on: November 16th, 2006 at 1:42 am

    I set up an old school SS account at MT in late winter and switched to the new Grid Server (GS) plan about a month ago, when it became available. 

    Sadly, the GS ser­vice has been highly lackluster thus far. 

    I’ve exper­i­enced reg­u­lar email out­ages and numer­ous data­base con­nec­tion fail­ures — once a week or more — stuff that never, ever occurred with SS. 

    I real­ize how tough the host­ing busi­ness is; I used to own a com­pany that ran such a ser­vice. But while MT sup­port is superb, I cur­rently feel like a guinea pig for the Grid. 

    The last thing I want to do is switch all of my domains back over to another host, but if this pat­tern con­tin­ues, I may be forced to. 

    Sigh.

30. 
    Foofy said on: November 20th, 2006 at 7:17 am

    I switched just hours ago and I’m already hav­ing prob­lems.  Everything seems a bit slug­gish, even com­pared to the crappy over-sold host­ing I was switch­ing from.  It takes quite a bit of time just to see the res­ults of the ls com­mand, and MySQL quer­ies also take sev­eral times longer than I expect from even low-end hosts.  

    Gonna keep it for a few days, see if the prob­lems go away.  And don’t even get me star­ted on how slow (both in terms of load time and usab­il­ity) the con­trol panel is. 

    There’ll never be an end to my host­ing woes!  :(