Well, after endless ranting and frustration, I have finally moved my blog off of the DreamHost servers and over to Media Temple. So far, I’m quite impressed with their service but it remains to be seen on how they hold up when a post goes popular on a social bookmarking site.
I purchased the hosting account over two weeks ago when my most recent post, 101 Adobe AIR Resources to Add to Your Toolbelt of Awesomeness, but didn’t have a chance until recently to switch the blog over. When, I believed one of my posts would go popular, I would sent support an email to let them know the server may be slammed with traffic. That post had the potential to drive a healthy amount of traffic so I emailed DreamHost. The post got popular on del.icio.us and the site was lagging despite having WP-Cache running. I received a few emails and instant messages from friends telling me the site was hanging. Eventually, support said that they were allocating resources for my site. They later followed up with an email telling me that I have “outgrown my hosting package and would recommend I upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server.”
That was the last straw. I was pretty torqued. The site was receiving a good stream of traffic for being on del.icio.us. Had the post gone popular on Digg, the site would have crashed and burned as it has done previously. Media Temple resonated with me because I’ve heard a fair number of people say that it’s Digg-resistant and affordable.
Once I got my account with Media Temple and got into their back end, I was quite impressed. The interface is very clean and initiative. The control panel has links to pretty much everything from the main page, you don’t have to drill down to find what you need. They have 1-click installs, cron management, SSH access, and a mass of other features. The Urchin web analytics service is included with your account. I will still use my analytics package of choice, but it’s nice nonetheless.
The blog transfer was a bit nerve-wrecking. I have never transfered a php / MySQL site between hosts, so I pretty much flying blind aside from a few tutorials I found online. I ended up making a fresh install so I had the most recent WordPress v2.5.1 and did not have any old plugin code laying around. WordPress has an “export” function that takes all of your posts and settings and creates an XML file. You take that file and “import” it into the new blog. That didn’t work. I was only able to get 11 posts from the blog, so I ended up copying over the core tables and that brought everything in. I copied over the images and the installed the plugins fresh and it’s up and running as you can see.
I still have DreamHost for a bunch of small sites that do not get as much traffic as the blog. Those can site for the time being. I’m in no hurry to move those unless they become insanely popular.
I look forward to the next time a post goes popular. I want to be able to serve pages to all the people that click the link. I don’t know how many people I could have had as subscribers or regular readers if the site was up during those times.
Anyone else use Media Temple? How do they hold up in a burst of traffic? Let me know in the comments.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Check out http://www.bigmoat.com. They are a new company with tons of redundancy built in.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Hello ShandyKing,
Nice to hear from you. I had a look at BIG MOAT’s hosting packages and it seems like they have a lot to offer. It’s a good motivation to move those other sites off of DreamHost.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:25 am
If you want something even better than MediaTemple try WebFaction ( http://www.webfaction.com ).
See http://www.istherefood.com/2008/03/27/webfaction-versus-media-temple/ for a comparison between the two.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
You should be quite pleased with Media Temple. I’ve used them for myself and several design clients over the years and have been nothing short of very pleased with not only their service/uptime but also customer support. They’re also very good at sending out emails to their clients whenever they expect downtime and usually outline how long and when that downtime may occur.
Enjoy.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
As of right this moment, I am thrilled with MT because they are keeping my blog alive during multiple front page visits. A post is about to hit the front page of Digg, and I am confident it will stay up.