Media Temple Reviews

Interestesting to read the previous reviews and learn the so-called "cluster issues" appear to be a chronic situation. I've been with MT for 3 months on cluster 8. Like clock work, their servers consistently are down with "denial of service" attacks, blah, blah, blah. When you contact Tech Support, wait times are nearly 25 minutes and the representatives merely read a scripted response when you inquire why your site is down.

I used MT a couple of years ago before they got too big for their britches. Their service was excellent and tech support wasn't plagued with long hold times. At one time they were known for their excellent service. Not anymore because it's all about the bottom line now. It's always more cost-effective to use aged servers than upgrade to meet demand.

MediaTemple used to be wonderful - they have an excellent administrative interface, once had really stellar support, have a great knowledge base, everything looks really shiny on their website...

Unfortunately, in the past 7 or 8 months they have really dropped the ball. They've got too many sites per Grid Service and it's causing all of the sites on that cluster to perform really slowly. If you buy an additional MySQL Grid Container, you'll see marked improvement in performance...but that's at an additional $20 / month (on top of the $20 / month you pay simply for a hosting plan). So at $40 / month, they just don't have that much value.

I have two of my own hosting plans with MT and many of my clients are with them. I won't be able to recommend them ever again since they have taken this long to correct the latency issues, I imagine it won't ever get corrected.

I recently left Media Temple. Read below, though, to find out why I left.

Almost from the start, I ran into service issues with Media Temple. The host was, at times, unbearably slow. During the four months that I was with them, I learned that a lot of the problems stemmed from a bad cluster (number 7) at Media Temple. While it was nice to know what the problem was, it most certainly didn't make me feel any better, since my members were being impacted almost on a daily basis. There was, in fact, one week in which we suffered an outage (from as little as five minutes to as much as 30 minutes) every day. That was my breaking point.

As a temporary solution to my problems (while I was searching for a new host), I opted for a more expensive service at Media Temple. I bought their Grid Container Lite ($40 a month). It's a dedicated environment that should, in theory, provide for a more consistent experience. While it was better than the $20 grid service, it, too, was plagued with technical issues. What's more, we still suffered from slowdowns -- even if we were not getting outages. Slowdowns stink because it often results in database errors. We've all experienced those: double posts, time-stamp errors, etc. By early December, I realized that Media Temple was not the company for me.

Over the next month or so (all of December), I complained incessantly to my admin about the crappy Media Temple performance. My admin, who likely felt guilty for recommending Media Temple in the first place (but shouldn't have), understood my plight. We both agreed that it was time to find a new host. I signed up with a new host in early January -- thought we didn't fully migrate until mid February.

In sum, I would avoid Media Temple. Their service is subpar.

I've been with Media Temple for two or three years now. For the first year all was well but then there started to be multiple issues with their "clusters". I was on the dreaded number 2 cluster that seemed to have multiple issues. Then, in the last year or so, I started having a lot of malware issues with my sites. I stayed vigilant on updating WP, changing passwords, etc. etc. Media Temple support for the longest time denied that the issue had anything to do with their hosting but multiple reports of their clusters being hacked poured in.

I had to sign up with a third party security company to keep my sites clean because MT support refused to do anything about it until they started getting hell on Twitter and Facebook about it. It would seem that Rack Space is also a big target for these hackers.

You would think that MT would do something to stop the hackers but so far I am getting hacked into at least twice a month. The icing on the cake was my site was a victim of a DDOS attack and MT was forced to take my site down for a few days then they charged me for the increased bandwidth.

I would stay with them if they would fix their problems but it seems as though they are not capable of doing so.

I'm now looking for a smaller web host whose servers won't be such a large target for the a##holes that do this crap.

- Zarias on twitter

I have been with mt from the last 2 years and I think their service is awesome. What I don't like is their response times, sometime site takes forever to load.

I have been a mediatemple customer since 2001 or 2002.

Inititally I got a special deal for their (ss) offering - their shared hosting, it was only costing me $4 per month to host my (very small) personal site. The support was phenomenal, granted it was a US phone number, but they always helped really quickly and professionally. The site always loaded fast, was always up etc etc - I was a delighted customer!

Around 2005 mediatemple brought out their (gs) (grid server). They really pushed the concept of "the grid" and did a good enough sales job on me that I switched to it. Still not a huge amount of money ($20 monthly) but the quality just tanked. Here I was paying 5 times as much for something that had not even a twentieth of the quality. My site started to take an age to load, there were outages of sometimes hours, support weren't interested.

If it were still possible to get the (ss) hosting from mediatemple I might still be able to endorse them - but the only thing I can say about their (gs) hosting is RUN AWAY.

To give an impression of how useless the support has become, I called them as I wasn't able to update my nameservers - they took over an hour to update the nameservers keeping me on hold all the time.

I fell in love with MediaTemple years ago. It's great that designers endorsed them and their control panels and customer service (real humans that are informed) are excellent.

However, I have fallen far out of love with them lately. They have far too frequent maintenance (weekly)and there was a time a few months back that email was down for 30hrs - but I stuck with them.

Well, this week the big one hit. And as you'll find if you go on Twitter or anywhere and search for Media Temple right now, 15,000+ websites went down with them. It wasn't just their grid server either, their virtual dedicated servers crashed too. When I called them, they told me "The Hard Drive is being scanned it will be about 6 more hours" that was 30 hours ago, and I think we all know there's more than just 1, big ass, harddrive broken right now.

27 of my websites, email , and FTP have been down for 48hrs now. My clients, and I, are furious. Their current "customer service response time" is over 20hrs (no kidding).

One of the sites that is down is for a film that my clients worked on for 3 years. It premiered in Scotland the day before the crash and is still down. For them, that's quite tragic.

I am currently actively seeking a host that delivers what (mt) promised. If any of you have any suggestions please by all means contact me.

Media Temple are having a lot of problems with their grid service -not all clusters are affected but the ones who are have been down or very slow for some time. It has been down for hours this weekend and the monitoring systems I have show poor performance for Media Temple every week.

When I pointed out the poor performance in comparison to another account I run with them, the reply I was sent was made out of a template basically telling me to look into my own webfiles via the GPU monitor, perhaps one of my script is dodgy - although this was rubbing salt on wounds, I did look into the GPUs and nothing significant showed up.

Shame; this was once the best hosting company but it has been more or less bad for more than a year now, and things seems to get worse. I feel betrayed and let down.

Since we started to use mt we have found their service to be great value . Their technical support is swift and they have helped with all levels of our questions via the control panel or over the phone

I have been using the (gs) for many months now and consider it to be one of the best clustered hosting products (if not the best) around. 1TB of bandwidth, 100GB of disk space, and a fantastic 24/7 support team is amazing value for $20/mo. Would recommend!

Have used Media Temple for a few years. The main server we use went down this summer and as a result some sites were offline for nearly 10 days. Media Temple lost databases that should have been backed up in the crash.

Overall their hosting performance and uptime is good. Customer support however can be slow if your not on US time zone and 30min+ queues on the phone do happen. Overall they are OK, but there is room for improvement.

I've hosted sites on mediatemple for about 5 years and really cannot fault them. Currently I'm using their grid server and am very happy with it. Anytime I've had any queries or problems my support queries have been answered very quickly and competently. All in all good value for money.

12 User Ratings

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Media Temple Overall rating 3.5 12

User Reviews – Page 1 of 2

We've 12 reviews by this host's customers. Unlike many hosting reviews sites, we go for quality - not quantity. Learn why we're different from other web hosting reviews sites.

Lindy Cindy

Nathan Swartz clicknathan.com

Marcus Sandiego zhpmafia.com

Zack Arias zarias.com

Uzair Nazir dpshots.com

Andrew Burnett andrewburnett.com

THEY they-design.com

Cedric deluxelab.co.uk

Darren Pelham conversion-rate-experts.com

Michael michaelyork.org

Gareth Davies gsinc.co.uk

Andrew Burnett andrewburnett.com

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Our Profile

Media Temple(mt), was established in 1998 and started by Demian Sellfors, the current CEO, and Thomas Anthony. Media Temple began as a design studio which also dabbled in hosting for its customers. Sellfors and Anthony soon realized that hosting offered greater business potential so they decided to concentrate on that side of the business.

Company and Services
Media Temple is headquartered in Culver City California and has several offices around the world. Since day one it has built up a reputation as a creative leader in the industry and today hosts more than 200,000 sites. Media Temple has around 80 members of staff and in 2007 its revenue exceeded $13 million.

Media Temple’s stated approach to hosting is to harness technology and simplify it for the everyday end users. It is one of a few hosts offering “grid hosting" at a price it believes individuals, as well as small companies and organizations can afford. With grid cluster technology, multiple stand-alone servers are linked to give extra capacity to websites during periods of high demand. Grid Service (gs) is Media Temple’s starter package. As it is cluster-based, hundred of servers work together to provide a scalable service for websites, emails and applications, even through high traffic peaks.

Grid Service comes with generous amounts of disk space (100GB) and bandwidth (1TB) plus it will host up to 100 domains and 1000 emails. Grid Service also comes with a customizable control panel (which you can use on the go with the iPhone Account Centre) and whole set of other attractive features. If you want more control, (mt) also offers VPS (dv or Dedicated Virtual) and dedicated server (dpv or Nitro) hosting.

Custom hosting solutions are catered for with Media Temple’s Complex Hosting (ch) option. If your site needs more capacity than you are allotted with your package, Media Temple will bill you for each extra GB used following a surge in demand.

The launch of (gs) made industry news back in early 2006. However, subsequent failures and outages with the Grid Service also made headlines in November 2006 and again in June of 2008, prompting changes to the system’s storage architecture which have seen improvements. Support is available 24/7x365 by ticketed email or toll-free phone. The average hold time for a support query is under two minutes.

Media Temple is listed as number 1,371 on Inc’s Fastest Growing 5,000 Private Companies in America list. It counts several leading international brands amongst its client base including Toyota, Rip Curl, Diesel, Sony and Adobe.

Server Location
Media Temple has two data centers – one for each coast of the US. The west coast data center is in Los Angeles and the east coast hub is in Ashburn, Virginia (some 48 kilometers west of Washington DC).

Related Links
Blog - http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog
Knowledgebase - http://kb.mediatemple.net

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