It’s sad for me to say this, but I can no longer recommend MediaTemple’s Grid service as a hosting option. For the last 18 months or so I’ve been using this service and have gotten increasing dissatisfied and exasperated by it. Today I started the process of moving my domains off of it to Siteground.com even though I have four and a half months left on that hosting contract. This domain should now be coming to you from siteground.com servers and hopefully in a reliable and maybe spiffy fashion.
MediaTemple.net was known as one of the premier providers of business-class hosting. It was acquired by GoDaddy with the promise that it would be separately managed. It appears from my experience with their Grid service that they broke that promise with their customers. Sometimes I have to wait a minute or more to retrieve pages from my own site. It sure looks like they are overloading their servers and/or managing them very badly.
I used UpTime Robot to test whether my domains are up. Pretty much every day I will get one or more emails telling me it is inaccessible. So it was likely costing me money, motivating me to move to Siteground.com instead.
I do have clients using MediaTemple’s virtual servers and they have no complaints about that service so far. Definitely avoid their Grid service now and if you have an option you might choose some other host for your virtual or private server needs. I don’t have experience with Siteground’s, but it’s likely fine. A company like Rackspace.com is likely doing it right.
Another annoyance was revealed simply in moving my site. An old phpBB forum I have with about 50,000 posts could not be downloaded. I had to break it down into multiple downloads, including the posts table into two separate downloads. The Grid service simply cut me off when I hit some sort of resource limitation. The whole database is only 80MB or so. Shame!
