Textpattern Support Forum

I dunno, I have servers with MT, Textdrive, SegPub, and some random smaller companies. The random smaller ones are the ones that give me the most problems.

Personally, I want to go MT all the way, but that might take awhile.

Oliver,

My route to enlightenment has taken me from self hosting, to shared hosting and finally to a VPS.

In the beginning I ran all my sites from the box that sits next to my desk, my sites got popular, bandwidth couldn’t keep up. So I went looking at shared hosting, rather than name names, let’s just say that in 6 months I tried two of them, very disappointed. I kept looking at my home server and wondering when we’d get decent upload bandwidth to the home. Then I started looking at a VPS, I found that Xen was the best and I found a small outfit I liked and moved my sites there.

Twelve months later and I’m very happy with my VPS, uptime has been great, only two burps to report in a year. Three weeks ago I did a restart on the VPS, takes but a few minutes, before that it had been running for 170 plus days without incident. This is an unmanaged VPS, as in I manage it, they keep the hardware humming along.

I truly believe that with virtualization maturing, the future is inexpensive VPS solutions. It’s where you have the most control over your environment and some errant script from somebody else’s public_html ain’t gonna bring you down also.

Paul Jarvis of TwoThirty has also written of his Media Temple woes with the Grid Server and had a chorus of similar replies. They are all from around the same time so it could be that things even out but…

Ramanan >
A few reasons as to why I switched:
I was overall satisfied with Dreamhost – though they did have some periods recently with permanently slow pageloads… However, I didn’t like working in their ugly-ass adminpanel. I’m a sucker for clean aesthetics.

And I was about to start building a mac-community website in response to the obvious opportunity it is when the established mac-community website in Denmark (Macnyt.dk) had to waive the white flag and surrender, take the site down for maintenance, because of server overload.

Therefore I figured, well, MediaTemple’s new Grid server should alleviate exactly that problem – with the Grid server I can rest assured my comepeting solution will not go down periodically, like my competitors website did;-) Apparantly, I’m now doing just as badly as he does now, with my MediaTemple problems everyday.

I’m starting to perceive it this way; a host is like any other relationship. The grass is often greener on the other side of the fence. But it all comes down to the fact that no partner is perfect, and never will be. There will always be arguments. can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

It seems one has to find the partner that makes you be able to stand them even though there’s trouble and high waves, discussions and problems.

I’ve found a friendly attitude is what matters there. If you’re friends, you can forgive. But friends treat each other with respect.

Applying that analogy to hosting partnerships, I must say I’ve liked the support-response from Dreamhost as well as Livehost.net – but even then; Yesterday I had to unlock my friends domain at the current registrar, Gotonames.com which is a product of Livehost.net – and since I could not figure out how to unlock it, in order to transfer it elsewhere, I wrote them a support ticket. I waited and waited. Then I went to bed. This morning I see they have simply closed the support ticket with no other notification than “will be re-opened”… Aha! When suckers? I need this domain up’n‘running now.

As you can see, it really is like nobody’s perfect. Seen from the philosophical viewpoint. But realistically, I did expect MediaTemple to be better than Dreamhost! I pay them twice as much. They have a better reputation, and a high-class no-bargain brand image to keep up and trustworthy.

Last edited by raveoli (2006-11-30 13:18:25)

I’m planning on switching from Dreamhost for downtime issues, along with a “host” of other problems over the last six months. They were nice folks, but it just wasn’t worth it.