As some of you know, last year I went from having my blog hosted on GoDaddy to using shared hosting services over at HostMonster (and before that, I went from having a Linux box on the floor of my bedroom to GoDaddy). Shared hosting is a fairly cheap way to set up a website, and you can usually get away with it for less than $10/mo. For the most part, I was pretty happy with HostMonster shared hosting, although in these last few months their databases kept falling over, and I had intermittent connection problems. To their credit though, they always answered the phone and fixed everything in a timely manner.
Media Temple’s iPhone Account Center
That being said, I’m going to try someone new this time. I asked a few people who they use, and a couple people recommended the next step which is shared computing on a grid computer. The concept seems pretty cool. Instead of having one system where your website is allocated on, you actually run on a large cluster. If you suddenly get Dugg or tons of traffic, you automatically scale to accommodate the new traffic. I’m not really worried about falling down due to traffic, but since I host multiple websites on my accounts, I’d like to have a bit more peace of mind when it comes to them staying online.
Last night I signed up for an account at Media Temple. I’ll probably attempt to move my main domain over tomorrow sometime and some of my other smaller sites over the next few days. There may be some temporary drop outs as things move over, but I’m fairly certain I can make it transparent.
Also, if you sign up on Media Temple, feel free to use my domain name (duanestorey.com) as the referral site — much appreciated!
We’ve been talking about finding new hosting for some time. Price and reliability is the concern, and the mantra is that you get what you pay for. We haven’t been paying much, but the service hasn’t always been reliable. I’m sure you’ll give Beck ideas now.
We should all compare hosting plans this weekend….I’m curious about the MT plan you got Duane and want to compare it to the Bluehost one I currently have that I’m happy with.
Not that it’s the reason I chose BH over another provider, but they have a fantastic affiliate program that is very generous. It’s a nice addition to Adsense that I’m kicking myself for not setting up earlier.
Hey man.. I got the grid service plan. You can read about it here:
http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/
The nice thing is they let you resell on it, so if I wanted to, I could set up a few domains, give them access, and charge them $5 a month or something to cover my costs.
I have been using MediaTemple for 9 months without any problems. Quick, easy, sophisticated and great support.