Thread

I have a customer being hosted at Media Temple. They are having emails swallowed up. They send an email to someone else in the same domain name and it goes AWOL. Media Temple suggested that they upgrade to the Grid Server and they did not fix the problem.

I am sure that you all will remember the Grid Server problems well documented here, here and here. I must honestly say that as a MT GS customer it seems that web server problems are smoothed out. They have now rolled out this “CloudMark” spam filtering technology and my client thinks that it is the culprit swallowing emails.

To the point…

What is the current state of affairs regarding hosting experience?
What hosts do you recommend for good consistent hosting and why?
What hosts to stay away from and why?

Check out this site http://hostjury.com/

I used this site when I did research for what server company I was going to use. There are various testimonials in some cases and some there are not. See what best fits for your overall hosting needs.

Never used Media Temple so can’t comment on the poll question. I do use EngineHosting and couldn’t be happier with them.

Hello Eric,
I can share experience with my own host but my needs are very minimum. Ultimately it is up to you forecast what type of service you would like to have and if you are going to extend your service over to clients. Here is some food for thought.
While right now you are frustrated I would take time and not necessarily look for a ‘solution to your frustration’...in other words don’t jump onto a new host just because they offer a better email service.

Now on the personal note I use SiteGround.com (reviews) but they may not be your best choice.

Reasons I picked them:
-wanted to move away from old host
-was tired of ASP platform/servers only
-needed something cheep (using shared hosting) with a lot of storage for photos (750 GB web space & 7500 GB traffic)
-looking to get setup quickly and get a new domain
-good support for OpenSource apps and ‘my testing’
-needed better and unlimited CP (especially to mysql)

Reasons why I am still with them:
-my account was upgraded (virtually unlimited storage with unlimited mysql,ftp and email accounts) at no cost 3 times over last two years
-I run a small personal site with not a lot of traffic nor e-commerce processing
-only 1 downtime incident for duration of 2-3 hrs in 2 yrs
-I work on site in ‘odd hours’ and would catch some hiccups and speed issues…the time it would take me to login and create a ticket issues would be resolved which means someone is actually monitoring the server and staying on top of it
-every ticket (about 15-20 of them total…due to my own doing or not) was attended if not resolved within 15min of my request.

Technical things I don’t like:
-webmail interface is poor (I pop my email so still not a big deal)
-there is no “backup” in CP due to abuse by some other site owners(still not a show stopper as I can write my own cron jobs)
-online support/ticket system is somewhat crude as their work flow is not the best (after a few attempts you can get it down to you benefit of faster ticket creation)

These are just a few thing I could think of but again I really have not ‘pushed the site’ with traffic and custom scripts. My experience was based of shared hosting plan while I have read some reviews where people had quite the opposite experience.
For what is worth…
All the best and good luck with making your choice.

Don’t have a long Theseus to give, but MT (dedicated-virutal) has been good to me.  Much better than Dreamhost (to my suprise) and way way way better than a pig farm webhost like 1&1.com.