I just bought EE personal with forums a few days ago.  Because I have a long background in IT and data center management, I was really attracted to their control panel and seemingly forward thinking with hosting.  They were also priced attractively.

I installed EE and the forum module.  I made no changes to the default template.  Only after I signed up with Media Temple did I discover that some folks were having issues with them.  After the first 24 hours, I noticed some outages, so I opened a case asking about generally high latency and some timeouts. Not wanting any surprises after the site launches, I decided to just do some external monitoring with monitus and a custom monitor using Cacti and RRD from a spare server at work.

Over the past 36 hours, the AVERAGE response time for the home page (default EE site) was 1400ms.  1.4 seconds seems perfectly reasonable to me.  But then I thought, what do the peak visitor hours look like?

Sure enough, 8am - 12pm Pacific had an average response time of 2.4 seconds, with frequent spikes of 6 - 10 seconds… and a few timeouts.  2.4 seconds seems doable, but not many people will wait 10 seconds before they think something is wrong with their browser.  We are just talking about spikes, so I wasn’t too concerned about the high occasional latency.  However, on each of the 3 days I monitored, the best uptime I recorded was 99.61 with the other two days being 98.64 and 98.68.  I certainly don’t expect 100% every single day, but if my first 3 days were like this, what was in store for me when I had actual traffic loads?

I did some digging around on their control panel looking for some reports that might shed some light on what was normal.  And here’s where things started going south.  Their control panel as sluggish to say the least.  10-14 seconds per click.  No kidding, no exaggeration.  Literally click, browse elsewhere, and come back.  Previous to today, I thought it was slow (4-6 seconds per click), but I figured it didn’t matter since I didn’t need the control panel often.  But then I thought if their control panel is this slow, how will they prioritize resources for my site?

Let me be clear: I am not an alarmist.  I don’t think any of the above data is difinitive.  However, I was concerned about the timeouts and 6-10 second latency spikes.  Keep in mind, the data from monitus and the monitoring from my data center at work correlated fairly closely.

I did make a mistake here:  we loaded a “coming soon” page as the default.  So now the default page is just a 15K image on a static HTML page.

I finally received a very generic response to my ticket today (2 days later).  It essentially said that they provide top notch service, yada yada, but didn’t even remotely address any of the facts and metrics I put in my case notes.  It did say they used pingdom tools to test the load times which they said were excellent.  of course!  The 15K static page is pulled from cache every time.  Doh!  I loaded pingdom tools and pointed the URL to the default EE site - 8.2 seconds!  Dang it!

So I called them…

The good news is that they answered the phone immediately. (awesome!)  Now follow the paraphrased converation below.  I am horrified.

(mt) Thank you for calling Media Temple customer support.  How can I help you?
(me) I opened a case and I wanted to discuss the response.
(mt) I need your domain name and your name sir.
(me) (I provided the information)
(mt) Ok, I now need your account center password
(me) The password I use to access the online control panel?
(mt) Yes sir
(me) Seriously?  Why do you need my personal password?  This seems highly irregular, especially for an online company.
(mt) We need it for account verification
(me) OK, but don’t you think there is another piece of data you can use other than my password?  It’s pretty much security 101 to never ask for someone’s password?  Have you ever heard of AOL?
(me) You can give me your last 4 numbers of your credit card
(mt) *fumbles for wallet and gives the numbers to her* (I then described the issue all over again and the fact that I was dissatisfied with the generic form answer I received)
(mt) Uh huh.  We don’t guarantee uptime.
(me) ok, but what about the latency and general performance concerns I have?
(mt) (silence)
(me) Hello?
(mt) Yes, I’m listening?
(me) How do you respond to my concerns about the high latency I’ve recorded from three different sources?
(mt) (silence)
(me) Hello?  Did you hear my question about the high latency concerns I have?
(mt) Let me put you on hold sir.
(me) ok
(mt) *2 mins later* ok sir, there really isn’t anything we can do for you
(me) what do you mean?  Do you think I should be concerned about the performance of my site considering it’s not even launched?
(mt) That’s up to you sir
(me) What’s up to me?  Don’t you have some guidelines on what is normal performance levels for your customers?  An SLA, or just a rule of thumb even?
(mt) It’s your perogative sir.
(me) Let me ask a direct question… do you think it’s acceptible performance for a web page to take 10 seconds to load?
(mt) (silence)
(me) Hello?  Do you think it’s acceptible performance for a web page to take 10 seconds to load?
(mt) Hold on sir.  Let me see if I can’t get you some help.
(mt) *2 mins later* Ok, I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you.  I’ve escalated your case.
(me) What does that mean for me?
(mt) I’ve escalated your case
(me) To who?
(mt) A manager
(me) When can I expect to hear from the manager?
(mt) hopefully tomorrow
(me) ok.  That would be great.

Conversation ended.  She later called me back at home (at 10:49pm) asked for the phone number that the manager should call.  I said, use my cell phone.  She said, what’s the number.  I told her that it was in the contact page of their online system as well as in the case I opened and all subsequent case notes.  I ended up tell her the number anyway.

Sigh.  </rant>

Wow… that really reads long.  Woops.

I am planning on working with (mt) the best that I can.  If it doesn’t work out, I’d love to hear what people think of Engine Hosting.  Their costs are certainly higher (2x - 3x for what I think I may need), but my site’s pointless if it’s not up.

Taking customer service to new levels, it seems…

What I think of EngineHosting? They really are as good as everybody says: Fast, stable, friendly, professional. I recommend them without hesitation. My pet peeve being that they don’t offer SSH for their accounts, so I only have (many of) my production sites there, not my (public) staging servers.

I have at least a dozen or so sites with EngineHosting (one of them is HUGE with tons of traffic each day; an NDA prevents me from telling you which one here, but send me a PM and I’ll share if you like) and have been with them for at least 4 years. . .  maybe 5. . .  a long time anyway.

I send them support requests at all hours, and I get responses back at all hours, I would swear that part of the crew there just sleeps at their desk or something. The two times I actually caught them out of the building, they just text me from a phone, and got me what I needed.

Our site uptimes have been great and when I’ve reported any issues in site performance they jump right on things and let me know what’s up. Typically it’s my ISP. When I didn’t believe them, I ran trace routes . . . and it was my ISP.

Over the years they’ve advised me on everything from file permissions, .htaccess files, how to read my site stats, and even recommended some good coffee once. They also treat all of my clients just as nice as they treat me, and go out of their way to explain things to them. Not just “it needs to be turned off/on” but why. And they can explain things in “plain English” or if you prefer “total network geek acronyms”; your choice.

About 3/4 years ago I had a contact script running in CGI (remember those?) that got hacked into. A few hundred emails went out and EngineHosting shut off my account to stop the embarrassing emails from going out under my domain name, contacted me immediately, and recommended some better, more secure scripts for me to consider. I removed the script, was back online in under an hour, and within a short while, I had a new scrip in place, and was back in business.

I recommend engine hosting without reservation.

Thanks for the feedback.  Any negatives to Engine Hosting?  Perhaps this is the wrong place to ask.

Another happy Engine Hosting customer here. I have several clients’ sites with them, including my own blog and portfolio site.
Tech support is friendly and fast and performance of the server is great.
And, because of the strong euro, the price is perfect!

I’m just a step or two away from requiring that my high volume, high functionality clients host with EngineHosting. I just don’t have the time to try and convince the Sys Ads of other hosting companies that EE is not the performance problem, their servers are. When I put clients on EngineHosting I never have to think about performance again. At the moment, about 70% of Solspace clients have been moved to EngineHosting.

mk

I’ve got a site at EH, but haven’t had a good chance to evaluate it.  Their responses to my inquiries early on were very quick.

Also, other than a few MySQL mishaps,  Mosso.com has been really good.  They have a grid service to compete with media temple.  Their customer service is top notch (I use the chat service) and their custom built admin panel is very well thought out… At $100/mth it’s very costly though.

Another satisfied customer here. We’ve (Nonprofit Tech) have moved about 60-70% of our clients to EngineHosting. In fact, the only ones we haven’t moved are typical university .edu or government .gov related (an exception is also our primary site, which needs massive decoupling before we can move it). All the .org or .com sites that we manage we’ve switched, and have been incredibly happy with. From speed and reliability of the servers to knowledge and willingness to help of the staff, we’ve been very, very pleased.

My one negative would be I find myself wanting more and more improvements in the account control panel (not the EE Control Panel). I know the crew are working to improve it and add more functionality; but handling multiple clients could be improved. I’m thinking of things like: when logged in provide basic account summary information in the sidebar or somewhere, things like: which domain matches this account, what plan is the account on; who the account is being billed to (surprisingly important to us, since we typically purchase the account for the first 6mo or year, and then the client is suppose to switch billing, some do some don’t); what other domains are attached to the account, etc. 

That said, that doesn’t take away from us whole-heartedly recommending EngineHosting for hosting for ours and our client sites. Their hosting services are excellent. It’s just the ‘cream’ of more management functionality that I’d want more of.

I moved from Mosso recently. They have excellent customer service, they couldn’t have been more helpful regarding setting up sites and getting things like forums to work with the custom mysql clustering they use.

But ultimately I made the decision to leave because the grid/cluster is in active development, and particular with php5 I kept getting (too many) timeout errors. I couldn’t wait any longer for consistency to improve.

I decided to move to something more dedicated as I’d lost confidence that they could solve an uptime issue at critical periods for me in regard to availability during traffic spikes (which was my initial draw to the cluster system they use).

I’ve migrated to Mediatemple DV (disclosure: (mt) offered me hosting sponsorship for this particular project), and so far have noticed a much snappier response/loading time. I had an issue with some slow loading yesterday and the ticket response and workaround to solve the issue was super quick.

With regard to my personal, less mission critical sites, which don’t have major server loads or traffic spikes, I have used A Small Orange for years, and they are absolute quality.

JimGoings - 22 August 2007 12:11 AM

(...)
(me) Hello?  Do you think it’s acceptible performance for a web page to take 10 seconds to load?
(...)

that is exactly why i cancelled my account a few days ago…

oh oh ... i just switched one of my client site to Media Temple.. the site is very big with a lot of visitors a day…. i heard good things about Media Temple..

Let’s hope everything goes well :/

P.S. i did do a support request 8 hours ago (still waiting for response)

I’ve also had a less-than-great experience with (mt) (client account, not mine). I don’t use EngineHosting personally, but we have referred - without hesitation -  several clients to them for no nonsense hosting.

Ah, a favorite topic.

I used to use MediaTemple until the grid server happened, but still have some accounts there. I love their control panel - it might be worth having an account there just to watch the GPU usage reports! While their offerings seem good on a cost for storage/bandwidth basis, you do have to watch those GPUs because I have heard of problems where users were getting unexpected bills for overage (that’s probably a rare case, though).

I will say that their customer service is horrible. I’ve actually had better luck than JimGoings on the phone, but I don’t have time to sit on the phone, and their email based service tended toward the condescending as though every problem was automatically the customer’s fault, or best yet, they’d wait a few days to reply, until the problem was resolved on their end, and send a reply saying something like “problem, what problem???”

I was having a lot of problems with the grid, which was slow and unreliable, and while the problems might have subsided, I’m still skittish (only the siren song of all that storage/bandwidth beckons). I have been trying their MySql containers lately, but not on a live site yet. I think my MT sites are slow, but I don’t want to declare that, because I can’t say for certain say that my scripts or something else might be a contributing factor and don’t want to be irresponsible that way.

I’ve since moved my own (4) sites to Engine Hosting and some new clients too (about 8 now in the last few months), considering that most of my storage/bandwidth needs are easily met even on the lowest plans. Not much of a control panel, but customer service is HUMAN, which is what I tell all my customers, and the performance is very fast and service reliable - in short, it’s nice not to worry about your Web host. My customers just want a Website, so they don’t care about grids or iPhone control panels, they just need to know that when their customers visit their Website it will work and I get that with EH.

Mosso is a basketcase, by the way, and I wish I knew about Textdrive, but I opened an account a while back and the seemed to have forgotten (I use the strongspace service only, which is why I haven’t pursued them on the hosting account).

Not to be a rant orso but…

about the support at Media Temple:
2007/08/23 08:28 AM (i sended a support request) it was a very simple question about raw logs
today: 2007/08/24 10:08AM (still nor reply)...man at hostgator i get a response within 2 hours :/

Enginehosting is good, but a little too costly too me. I need a lot of Space and BW… and Enginehosting prices are just too high for me now..

I wonder how a hosting company can have such a slow support and still be in business.
Prolly the big company’s that have Bigger accounts (techcrunch.com) have *premium* support.. and we the small people must suffer

Actually what you find is after initially setting up a website, 99% of customers don’t need support frequently. Also interesting is that same amount of customers are the ones that rarely, if ever, push their limits. Seems most people just put a site up and leave it alone.

So big companies can get away with so-so support that way.

I always thought mt was one of the best hosting company’s out there.. wanted to transfer my clan’s site there, I think ill have a look at EngineHosting now.

I switched to mt(dv) about two months ago and test drove it with several ee websites. My experiences have been the following:

1. As stated above, the control panel is pretty great. I found it slightly difficult at first because I came from cpanel, but after several phone calls to mt, I’ve now found it very powerful and easier than cpanel.

2. I sympathize with JimGoings phone call because I know how frustrating poor customer can be, but in my experience, I’ve called mt at least 20-30 times in the past 2 months and every time I’ve received such friendly and helpful people on simple and complex issues. The other great thing is the phone support is available 24hrs.

3. The one disadvantage I’ve found with mt is the email support. I’ve written about 15 emails and now have come to the realization that I won’t receive a response for about 24 hours. It is annoying, but I now just call if I need something urgent.

4. In the past 10 days, they did experience a major server issue that affected several accounts including my own. Though it was a slight inconvenience for me, I do have to give them credit for keeping me posted on the issue until it was resolved.

I’ve never used pMachine for hosting, but if their customer support is equal to the support for Expression Engine, it must be amazing…

Just thought I would share my interactions with mt.