Thread

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.

I know many others don’t think this way, but I have found the support at DH to be pretty good. They are cheap, but they do have other caveats.

I was a huge fan of Media Temple….that was before the switched to the Grid. then it totally tanked. Customer service is terrible. their job now is to basically tell that everything is ok and you are imagining any lags in performance.

I have also used Engine Hosting. The performance is very nice. But I do have issues with it as well. Their control panel is very very lackluster. It has just a few basic functions: a link to phpMyAdmin, a web-based ftp, a form to request email addresses, Sawmill reports, and account information updates. That’s basically it. The email setup is particularly frustrating to me. You have to basically put in a request to do anything. You can’t just go into the control panel and add users, change passwords, manage quotas, manage access, setup aliases, etc and have it be done. You fill out a form, submit it, then someone in their support has to go in and actually set it up for you. No spam controls. No way to manage access to directories. No real server status/usage statistics. No cron jobs…etc. If you are used to using any other host, this is super bare bones. And for some of my clients, hasn’t really been acceptable for them. Also their storage space is really low for the price they are charging. But I haven’t had any issues with poor performance.

My favorite host recently has been Blue Host. They are pretty cheap. Have excellent support. And I haven’t had performance issues.

James, while I value your opinion, I would like to shed some light on a few of your complains/issues about our offerings. This post is a “book” and long enough I split into two posts.  Sorry for the longness but it could be worse 😉

>The email setup is particularly frustrating to me. You have to basically put in
>a request to do anything. You can’t just go into the control panel and add
>users, change passwords, manage quotas, manage access, setup aliases, etc and
>have it be done. You fill out a form, submit it, then someone in their support
>has to go in and actually set it up for you. No spam controls.

I will admit the email management portion of our control panel was removed when we switched to our new site design, and switched over to a dedicated load-balanced/clustered email server solution back in March.  The revamp of this part of our control panel was not set high as a priority, under our old email server we found less than 5% of our clients using self-management.  Instead most were directly requesting changes to their email accounts through support requests to our staff.  We added a web based form to assist clients in requesting email account additions/changes, and even today we still get direct requests via email/support rather than even using those forms. 

This could be annoying to clients in need of full control, though managed solutions seem to be very friendly to a lot of our non-technical clients.  Also I simply think some of our clients are simply not interested in any of these types of account management functions, and simply figure they are paying us for services, so they fully use our managed support services, which is what they are there for.

We do plan on re-releasing our self-managed email functions, and in fact a number of additions to our control panel, but again there were other priorities higher on our internal project list simply because of the level of usage before.  As a small side note, no real reason to be able manage email quotas when each individual email account is outfitted with a fixed 300 megabytes of storage separate from any other storage included in your hosting account.

>No way to manage access to directories.

Actually, if you need that type of management .htaccess does work well for this need.  If you need more web based type management there are a number of scripts we can recommend to assist if you ask our staff, and explain your needs.  Not all clients needs are the same, and when a few simply lines in a .htaccess file are all that are needed when a client simply needs 1 username/password for a single directory, it really is a simple solution.

>No real server status/usage statistics.

I am not sure what this is directly in reference to.  If you are referring to the actual health of our servers, there has been little reason to provide a “green” light for each of the many physical servers that handles a given clients site.  Our staff post notices if there are any client affecting issues, and updates to what the cause/resolution was.  This is similar to the status pages of many other hosting providers.  Large, and complex networks its a little hard to do simple green light, unlike it is when just about every service runs on a single physical server in most off-the-shelf hosting solutions like cPanel.

Usage stats, I am not sure if you mean for your site, which is what the Sawmill reports would be for, or if you mean overall web site usage. 

Overall server usage (ie: resource usage, cpu/ram/etc) would be likely confusing and complex as web sites are handled across multiple servers in a load-balanced (or buzz word “grid”) web server setup.  There would also need to be the same for our email clusters, sFTP servers, apache log storage systems, file storage systems, and the list goes on.  All in all there are 15 to 25 separate servers, or clusters of servers that handle separate portions of each hosting account, as our infrastructure is highly distributed in nature.  Our focus has always been to provide performance, stability and service to our clients.  Our control panel solution is a little weak compared to some places, I will agree.  I do feel that at least we are instead providing our clients value for their money in many other ways, and in ways that have kept clients with us for years, and bring more to us every day from those other providers.

>No cron jobs

Yes you can’t set these up on your own, as our staff does like to review them first.  Part of the piece about performance and stability, and if anyone is not sure how cron jobs can have an effect on that I would be happy to explain in a PM as to not get this thread too far off topic.

>Also their storage space is really low for the price they are charging.

On this topic, ask the other hosting places providing huge amounts of storage if they backup your web site files and your database files every 6 hours, each day, on-site (same data center) and off-site (secondary data center).  Likely not, likely once daily, on reviewing hosting companies clients are moving away from, we have even found ones that only do weekly or simply to a 2nd HD in the same server! This is one of the reasons our storage limits are smaller than many of the bulk hosting places.  Another reason is we don’t use cheaper, slower drives, internal on servers, as you really can’t do this in a load-balanced server environment.  High performance storage arrays, high performance fiber channel hard drives in those arrays, and the infrastructure to get the data between the storage arrays and the servers, all equal higher overall site performance, but smaller, and more realistic storage amounts.

(end part 1)

Likely if we were targeting the bulk hosting market with our services we would be running off-the-shelf hosting control panel software, on single or few servers with big, cheap internal HDs (instead of expensive central storage arrays) we could offer huge amounts of space for nothing monthly.  But we would likely also be forced to providing the same type and quality of service that actually is the driving force behind many clients to move to us and away from other hosting providers.  More so when the needs of their high traffic, or highly complex sites needs fall on deaf ears at the other providers too.  I can’t count the number of times we have clients move to us after their current hosting providers only answer is to blame the software running on their sites, and I am not just talking about EE powered sites either, as our clients to indeed run a diverse selection of software on our hosting plans.

Our staff are constantly evaluating, updating, and expanding our hosting solutions, infrastructure and other vital needs to keep our clients, fast, secure and informed.  Much of it continues to be the stuff behind the scenes, but there are more “visual” changes, like our control panel that will see changes in the near future as well.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but I did want to explain a few pointed issues with our services.

Please, if you have any questions or comments amount my post, feel free to private message me directly, so we can allow the original author’s thread to stay on track rather than going too far off the original topic.

Thank you for your time if you made it this far 😊

I understand.  If (mt) fails me, I’ll certainly call you guys. 😉

I have some insider knowledge of how the (mt) infrastructure “grid” is setup.  The model is sound… it makes perfect sense and is truely in an enterprise class.  It is on the bleeding edge though and they have had to kinks to work out.  I haven’t had any major issues so far and I once I got a call from their support manager, my mind was put at ease.

I’m not sure how much of what I know is supposed to be private, but suffice to say that their storage technologies are second to none.  They did not skimp on space or performance.  I manage server infrastructures for a living, so I have some specific understanding of their configuration.

I am hopeful that (mt) will work out well in the end.  If not, I’ll certainly consider EE Hosting first, although I will greatly miss the freedom and quick configuration changes that the (mt) control panel offers.

Oh and please don’t take me wrong.  I am not saying that our hosting control panel will always be as limited, but we selected to focus on the back-end infrastructure first rather than the control panel.  MT setup is still in the end a load-balanced web hosting solution, and yes, does have a number of bleeding edge technologies, though I question how some of it was deployed, that is neither here nor there, just my opinion.

I guess it depends on your market focus, priorities, etc.  Our solutions actually seem to attract more businesses, corporations, educational institutions, and high-traffic dynamic sites, and likely less on the personal side.  But again, its all about priorities and choices for both people looking for hosting solutions, and people providing them.  I believe MediaTemple, like us, are focusing on a specific market segment and going after it with something other than the usual cPanel, Ensim, instant web hosting provider solutions and I do applaud them for that.  Though since the launch of the Grid I can’t complain at all about the clients that have moved to us from MT in the least 😉

Again if you have any specific questions at all about us, please feel free to drop me a note directly through my profile here in the forums.  Hope you are enjoying the weekend as well, its been really nice outside in our neck of the woods!

I thought I would weigh in here.

I have been a MT customer for a couple of years. Switched from GoDaddy.com. Hated GoDaddy for a lot of good reasons I won’t go into that here. I have been getting supreme customer support from MT. I seem to talk to mostly the same people every time. Seems like a small-ish place that is on the grow. Awesome control panel.

My sites are simple, lower traffic site. nothing real heavy.

When MT went to the Grid Servers I was disappointed because of the pricing. Seems that the price of hosting just went up 70% but no discernible performance increase. Yes, you get a Ruby container and Mysql server access from an outside IP. Both nice but not a big deal to me at this time.

Lately I have seen the same performance drop on GS server from MT - but not all grid servers at MT. Most of mine are acting the same - some timeouts. I just added a new customer with the hope that they will get things straightened up and back to their old self, that the GS concept is going to get it’s kinks worked out. The new customer I added is getting blazingly fast server times. None of my customers are worried about $110 or $200/year as long as it works.

Media Temple has handled my complaints like this. First they tried the “There’s no problem” tack. As I pressed deeper I got the “Yes, there is a problem. We are working on it with an outside vendor and hope to have it resolved soon.” I have chosen to have faith and if the problems don’t resolve buy renewal time, then switch.

I guess I respect someone that knows they have a problem and are working to fix it rather than hiding the problem. Time will tell if my optimism will pay off.

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

I was having loads of trouble with downtime and sluggish performance with A Small Orange, so I switched to EngineHosting a couple weeks ago and for what it’s worth for the short time I’ve been with EH, they’re the BOMB! 😊

Quick to answer support emails, and phone calls (only had to make one). They worked with me every step of the way on getting my site switched over from A Small Orange and the support person I spoke with on the phone even went as far to try and assist with a problem that was out of the scope of what she was there for.

Only thing recently that has been slow is I put in a request a couple days ago for a secondary domain and I did receive a response that they would get it taken care of, but the secondary domain hasn’t been added as of yet. Not really a big deal though as it’s not an urgent matter right now.

Media Temple update.

I *think* my problems have been resolved. I have spoken to a MT representative and have learned the following. The Grid Server had a problem. They think they have fixed the problem. They are now in the process of moving all the GS accounts to new hardware. This is taking a long time as it can only be done at night and there is a lot of data.

For whats it’s worth it looks like my problem has gone away. The rep said that they should all be done within the next week or two (mid October 2007).

What is anybody else’s experience. Are you still having problems?

One other thing… I voiced my displeasure with their first line “Nothing is wrong” answer when they know good and well that they had a significant problem. It would be helpful if others voiced this same concern. In my book it’s not the fact that you have problems that bothers me, it’s if you are working to fix them. To me this lie just causes me to lose confidence in the organization.

I was with MT before the grid rollout, was a part of the beta, and then ended up moving from MT after they switched over.  Performance went completely down the tubes with the Grid, and it never got better.  I stuck it out for a couple of “we’re working on it” as well as a few “we’ve fixed the problem”, which never helped performance at all.

Before Grid MT was solid with excellent customer service. After it rolled out, they had by far more downtime for maintenance (which was supposed to be eliminated completely because of the nature of the grid) than previously. Customer service went from A+ to F overnight.

Their website is pretty, their CP is gorgeous and gives you tons of control. But the service and product is (was) horrible. It’s too bad - I really used to love them but had to move my site and a few client sites away because I couldn’t accept 10 second response times and 30 second page loads while they took months to figure out what was going wrong…

:(

Brian:
Where did you move to?

How is that going?

I actually moved to EngineHosting like some others in the thread.  Very satisfied, although I kind of miss a control panel.  Support is excellent - they even went out of the way to modify something on a shared server to support something I was doing. That’s not something you see every day.

It seems like most hosts I’ve been with over the years really rely upon a few key people who know what’s going on. If at some point that person (or persons) leaves then the company crumbles.

I have both a GS and DV account with (mt) I found that the grid has a memory, that is say that the more your site is called up the faster it is served.  However, it seems that if you upgrade to the mySQL container and turn off all caching it speeds up the performance quite a bit.  Only 2-3 secs now.  I’ve yet to try it on my DV will post my results.