Thread

I believe I saw someone here that said they use media temple. I was wondering what you think of it and there grid system, and also how well does CI optimize the GPU resources?

Thanks,

SpooF

The grid system sucks.  I noticed the other day that they are working on a new system which will be called by a different name.  Sounds like they are trying to clean things up to me.  I have seen so many people talk about how horrible MT is that I don’t think there is any reason to use it.  Even if someone can come into this thread and defend it, there are a bazillion other hosts out there which are at least as good.  Do a search on this forum and the ExpressionEngine forum and you will see.  Even 50/50 good to sucks ratio is bad for me.  I tend to go for hosts with a near 100% agreement that the host rocks.

What is a good provider?  I use VPS providers which is not for everyone.  However, development should not be done on shared providers because if you blow something up you screw everyone on the server.  For that reason, I think developers should go VPS.  Slicehost rides mighty high in that category.

If you are looking for a solid developer friendly shared provider.  I have been hearing nothing but good things about WebFaction.

I am currently using Slicehost but I am thinking of switching to MediaTemple. For the most part, MT would give me more bang for my buck. Right now, I am having to run Lighttpd which is a great server, but not the norm - simply because of memory issues. My email services have also been off-loaded to Google, which is awesome, but I don’t like being forced to do so (once again because of memory issues).

For the same price as the minimum Slicehost slice, I could get all of these services hosted on MT. I dunno - it’s a toss up for the time being.

I’ve been reading quite a bit about (mt) lately and from what I’ve read they seem to have made up for the horrible service they have provided in the past. When they first started the grid system, they didn’t have anything to monitor GPU usage so when clients where getting overly charged they had no answer. Also they were calculating GPU usage wrong. After releasing their new control panel sites that originally used 1000+ GPU’s now use less then 100. However a few places (non official) said that (mt) might be dropping their grid system and moving to a cluster. I’m not exactly sure how this will effect their hosting or service though.

The thing Im really interested in is the GPU system. They have some comparisons about it on their site.

# 1000 GPU’s is equivalent to running a continuous 10% load on one processor for the month.
# You can use up to 1.38 GPU’s per hour and not go over the 1000 GPU limit
# 1 GPU = 7.24% of 1 CPU for 1 hour

With the new control panel that they have implemented it allows you to have complete and utterly ridiculous stats on the GPU usage of your account, down to every single file. This is nice because it can tell you what part of your site you need to optimize.

The GPU system is also nice because your site will never be down unless the grid is down. There are no penalties for using over a certain percent of a servers CPU. However, if you use over your allowed 1000 GPUs you will be charged 10 cents for every GPU your over.

Im still not certain what a single GPU can handle. I’ve heard around the net that 1000 GPUs can handle around 250,000 to 300,000 page requests. It really depends on how optimized your site is running, which is one of the things Im interested in, how does CI run on (mt).

You can’t polish a turd.  I still see reports of horrible service in the ExpressionEngine forums.  I don’t see why the “grid” is so shiny to people.  It sounds great in theory but a top notch traditional shared hosting provider is still more stable.  Virtualization is the fix to the problems of shared hosting. 

While we can argue if MT is OK for personal sites I wouldn’t even entertain the thought of running anything important there (production business.)

I’m also currently looking at Web Faction. I’ve read through their web page and I’m impressed. However, there is a single feature I’m looking for and I know (tm) offers it.

I’m a high school senior and this summer (with a friend of mine) I’m going to start a small web design company for our local area. We are interested in a solution that offers the ability to resell resource, but not like a traditional reseller. We are not interested in providing a control panel to our clients, the basic idea is to offer a cheap and reliable hosting solution for all of our clients that need it (we will be managing the web page anyways). This also provides us with an easier way to access our clients web page if they need updates or any maintenance. Basically we are the webmaster of the clients web page. Some people frown upon this, but since we are not a hosting company I see nothing wrong with it. Its just like hosting a large sum of your own web pages on any other host, expect we don’t necessarily own the web page, we just manage it for our clients.

Its easier to manage a large sum of clients on a single hosting account than having to work with multi accounts. Also this provides our clients to max out the resource that we have, and if they do so we can easily upgrade our resource (one of the reasons Web Faction looks nice).

However this is sound more like what (mt) grid solution but on a smaller level lol

Right, and as I mentioned, I would not run production business sites on MT.  I would not do this for my own business sites and certainly not for clients.  It may be rock solid one day, but I don’t think they are there right now.  Your focus needs to be more on clients being rock solid than giving you an easy to manage system for your new web dev business.

You might consider EngineHosting.  They are partners with Ellislab, what better place to host Ellislab code?  They also have a cluster type of system and I have seen no complaints.  This might be a little more expensive but I would have the client pay for their own hosting and just give you access. 

Being a “host” yourself is a serious PITA.  Your honey will be in web dev, and hosting is just a big distraction.  Look at the business models, a web host makes a profit by running thousands of accounts, we web dev can make a living on just one good client.  When you are bogged down in work heading into a deadline the last thing you want is a phone call from a client having problems with hosting.  Yes, you can tell the client to contact the host but you will still be the pestered middle man.

Forget the reseller control panels.  Just refer your clients and get their access details for when you need them.  Tell them to contact the host for any problems.

Wow John, you seem to have a bit of pent-up bias against MT there…

I have all my sites running on MT and they run great - I’ve made a few support requests to the guys while I was setting up a production Ruby on Rails app with their “Container” system and they were really good - quick and helpful. Everything I have experienced with the Grid-Service has been great; haven’t had any outages or anything and their control panel is really nice to use.

The Containers, from what I’ve experienced, are very well designed and there’s plenty of command-line goodies to help you tweak the setup/system.

I haven’t personally taken the whole GPU thing to the limit to be honest, so I cannot speak for that, But I believe Dan Cederholm’s “Foamee” runs on a single GS account and is highly trafficked.

I would recommend MT to anyone. However, if I was going to be running high-traffic sites, my preference would be to use a DV setup and not necessarily a GS

We’ve got a MT account for hosting of some large forums that I manage/own - but that would be all I would use the account for. Being based in Australia I tend to prefer to host here as well as allows for much lower latency!

The whole MT system IMO is quite nice and we are actually using the account we have there for our other server’s remote backups 😛

Oh also be very careful with the intensity of your sites as it didnt take much for us to be forced to pay for a mysql container/pool thingamajig.

Wow John, you seem to have a bit of pent-up bias against MT there…

No, I have just seen too many bad reviews for them and they would not be on my host referral list for clients.

Spoof, take a look at WebHostingTalk for more reviews.  That forum is where I do all my research on hosting providers.  There are jokers there as with any forums but there are also a lot of great views.

There was a thread on MT in the EE forums just this week.  This is pretty much how I see most discussions on MT go.  Half the people say it is great and they have no problems and the other half complain about the performance.  This is not really a confidence booster.

I just got sick of latency. There are a lot of great, and not so great, hosts in the US, but it does not really matter when ping is 200 +. A site wil allways feel and act a little slow. Recently (last 2 months) I have also been testing out a VPS with http://gandi.net in France. They are also trying to build and market something new and fancy, like the (mt) GRID. It is, however, more proven shares of Xen. Performance has not been 100% flawless in this beta period, but it has the makings a good and flexible system, I think. One share, basic 256 VPS, is $7.50 a month right now.

Let me throw another bit into this conv, I just got my hosting package with EngineHosting. This is what I have to say.

Setup was fast, maybe slower than normal since I didn’t have any of the creditcards to pay with, but they allowed me to transfer using paypal. After payment the server was up in no time. Not too pricey for a personal site $10pm, and I feel I can trust them more than all these little companies, I don’t know why but using CI just makes me love EllisLab, anyway. The control panel is very lacking, they don’t let you manage MySQL/Email or anything really. They say a new control panel is in the making which I think is defiantly needed.

To do with the actual hosting its all good so far, I’m not going to run many sites from it but will have to see how it goes.

That VPS with gandi sounds very good I have to say. Do you know how expensive it would be after the BETA?

I’m with the (dv)3.5 service on Media Temple. It is basically a Centos 5.1 box that I administer myself. I feel $50 a month is good value and the support has been very good for two years. I host around 30 sites on the box and it is rock solid (I did set it up exactly how I want it though!)

The (gs) is flakey and has problems with MySQL performance in particular. That said they are near to a second release but I would suggest avoiding it for sites with traffic over 1000 hits a day.

@Adamp1:  What do you need in a control panel?  I don’t go any farther than Webmin and PHPMyAdmin with my servers.  The less control panel you can get away with the better.  Cpanel and Plesk are bloated, use up too much resources and just get in the way.  By the way, EngineHosting does give you access to PHPMyAdmin.

@Shape Shed:  As much as I have talked about staying away from MT in this thread I have no reason to think that DV would not be a good hosting solution.  The DV is a VPS which is great but perhaps a little expensive.