Aytemir.com

Don’t believe the hype of Gridservice

The MediaTemple Grid-service “is a cluster-based, modern hosting service powered by hundreds of servers working in tandem to power your websites, applications and email with unrivaled power, burstability and reliability”.
Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Background story

I’ve just recently moved to MediaTemple and at this moment my following sites are hosted with (mt): aytemir.com (that would be this blog), fan-tas-tic.com and VoetbalPortaal.com.
All three sites have very humble amount of traffic to handle and are WordPress or vBulletin powered, with some standard popular plugins or mods.
Nothing fancy. Nothing special.

Because VoetbalPortaal.com grow slowy too big for the shared host I was with, I had to move (all my sites) and I believed the hype and decided to move to the ‘state of the art’ and ‘digg-proof’ grid-service of MediaTemple. You never know when you’re gonna need a ‘digg-proof’ host, I guess . And boy did I regret that! And still do regret it!

I had no reason not the believe what they claim on their site: TechCrunch is hosted with them. And a sub-devision of Sony. Although on a more expensive plan. But also a lot of (big) blogs are also with the unrivaled Grid-Service of MediaTemple.

Here comes trouble

Since I’ve moved to (mt) and settled everything all seemed fine, excepts the servers where slower than I was used to with the cheap host I used to be. Bad luck, I guess.
But from day one I got ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query’, ‘User *** already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections’ and ‘Out of memory’ errors via the vBulletin backend. My site had been down for several minutes several times: Although (mt) thought that this may have been caused by ‘bad neighbours’, I never had this kind of issues with other (normal) shared hosts!

Here comes the $olution

And different employees from (mt)-support all suggested me that I should buy an additional service to make up for the initial service, which should be correctly working in the first place: I should get a MySQL Gridcontainer to make sure I wouldn’t bother by other customers on the same cluster.

Although I thought that was ridiculous and I expected to have 99,9% uptime and database-connection and I shouldn’t have to buy an additional service for a simple and humble site…I had no choice, because (mt) had me ‘by the balls’: I had already lost 50% of my monthly unique visitors during the transition* to (mt) and I could not afford to loose more!

More toruble? More $olution!

So I decide to purchase an additional MySQL Gridcontainer. Now I don’t have the ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query’, ‘User *** already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections’ warnings anymore.
But I do have ‘Out of memory’ warnings and even more frequently than before. And guess what (mt) is suggesting as a possible solution? Yes, you’re right!
They suggest I should buy an additional service to make up for the initial service, which should be correctly working in the first place: I should upgrade the memory of my Gridcontainer!

The irony of al this situation is that I had no issues with any of my humble sites at all when I was at the ‘el cheapo’ host for only 30,- euro’s a year!
Now I’m having frequently database-connection error, out of memory errors and I’m not the only one as far as I can tell from the Support Forums. And (most) of us have only simple websites.

The conclusion

Long story short: don’t believe the hype of the Grid-Service (maybe this goes only for MediaTemple) and the ‘digg-proof’ claims they make; at the moment it’s very in-stable and it has problems handling a very average sites like aytemir.com, fan-tas-tic.com and VoetbalPortaal.com.
And when there are no errors, the sites are very slow compared to what I’m used to…before I’ve moved them to MediaTemple.

So just make sure you do more research than I did before moving to another host…or you may end up paying and upgrading to most advanced servers and services, just to host a humble WordPress blog or a vBulletin powered forum!

Disclaimers

PS: the (mt) support is just advising and suggesting and they’re not really ‘forcing’ me buy additional service to make up for their initial service, which does not deliver what they promise.

PS: there are testimonials of (mt) Gris-Service users which are just happy and claim their service does just what it should!

*This is not all (mt)’s fault, because I had to switched from .nl to .com for personal reasons, but constant db-connection errors made things worse.