MediaTemple: The last hosting plan you’ll ever need

MediaTemple, the web hosting service favored by designers, has finally announced their new Grid-Server (gs) hosting plan. Unlike other shared-hosting plans, Mediatemple’s Grid-Server eliminates the “bad neighbor effect” by distributing the load over several servers instead of confining it to one machine. This redundancy means more stability and virtually no downtime.

After testing the new plan for several weeks during its beta period, I’m proud to say this plan delivers the best bang for the buck out of any hosting service I’ve tried in the past. $20 a month will get you loads of features, including the following:

• 100GB of storage
• 1TB of short-width bandwidth
• Multi-domain hosting for 100 individual sites on one account.
• Ruby on Rails
• 1000 email accounts
• 1-Click install for Wordpress, Drupal, Gallery, and ZenCart

Before you sign-up, here’s what I like and don’t like:

What I like

Digg defense
Before Mediatemple, LifeClever was hosted on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) plan at Rimuhosting for about $40 a month. The service was excellent, but once articles on LifeClever started getting Dugg, the server would crash because of sudden traffic spikes. Even a $20/month memory upgrade couldn’t handle it. Mediatemple’s Grid-Server (gs) alleviates this problem with Grid Performance Units (GPUs.) I don’t know what it means technically, but practically, it means the server can handle occasional traffic spikes caused by sites such as Digg, Slashdot, and BoingBoing. This feature alone is made it worth switching to the plan.

Real people and real service
Many other hosting plans are quite shady. You have no idea who the owners are or where they are located. Often, they are just resellers with no real support team of their own. In contrast, Mediatemple is a real company located in Los Angeles with a live human staff and support team. You can actually visit them if you’re in the area. Customer support isn’t outsourced and is available 24x7. I’ve run into some hiccups where Mediatemple’s support team actually called me to let me know. This kind of courtesy is rare among any service provider.

Usable control panel
Mediatemple also takes pride in their control panel, and deservedly so. I recently tried out the control panel at another popular hosting service, Dreamhost. It’s atrocious both visually and functionally. Mediatemple’s control panel, on the other hand, is clean, logical, and organized well. This elegance is probably why designers in-the-know prefer MediaTemple.

What I don’t like

Crippled web stats
Mediatemple has built-in web traffic analysis via Urchin. This is fine if you have one domain. However, if you host multiple domains, stats for all sites will be rolled into one set of reports. Mediatemple also doesn’t allow you to install AWstats, a populr traffic log analysis application. :-(

No user forums
While customer support is speedy, no official user forums exist for customers to ask each other for help or to discuss hosting tips and tricks. True, MediaTemple has a public KnowledgeBase, but it’s slim and doesn’t allow users to edit or contribute. In short, Mediatemple needs to foster more community for its customers.

Where is Jason McVearry?
After being so impressed by Mediatemple, I emailed Jason McVearry, Mediatemple’s Partner Director, to ask about a possible partnership with LifeClever. I noticed some other design-related sites display an “In Partnership with Mediatemple” badge, and I wanted in. Sadly, after about a month, there’s still no response from Jason. I’m sure he’s a busy guy and perhaps LifeClever doesn’t get enough traffic, but I feel a little burned to not even get a rejection letter. Oh well, life goes on. It still hasn’t stopped me from recommending Mediatemple to friends, colleagues, and readers.

Update (Oct. 20): Jason McVearry has just kindly emailed me. It looks like he was travelling at the time and thus my email got overlooked. Here is his response:

Hello Chanpory,

I see you’re trying to make me famous on your blog. In my defense:

I was in route to the Carson workshop “Future of Web Apps Summit” where I was in charge of organizing and throwing a party for the speakers for (mt) and completely over-looked this email..my mistake.

Understand the amount of partnership emails that come across my plate is not small and it’s extremely difficult to 1. make an immediate assessment of a project and 2. respond to all of them in a timely manner. Truth be told, it may take a follow up email to get enough attention to start a dialogue. I agree with you that a rejection email is better than none. We do not have a rejection letter unfortunately (putting on to-do list)

We do have a system in place where-in sales sends the prospective partnership candidate a more -or-less qualifying form. One of the general prerequisites is the partner candidate become a client and establish a business relationship prior to us considering partnership (you are already a client…something I did not get immediately from your email). We do consider non-clients, but these relationships are typically sent to us by current partners, are considered because the site/brand is on our radar or we seek them out.

Regarding Partnership: Absolutely.

Jason

Yay!

The bottom line

For sites with moderate traffic and occasional spikes in heavy traffic, Mediatemple leaves the competition in the dust with effective load-balancing, real support, and an elegant control panel. For $20 a month, it’s not perfect and has a few minor issues and annoyances. This, however, won’t prevent most customers from making the most of Mediatemple.

Note: Mediatemple did not pay us to write this review.

Of course, if you do decide to go with Mediatemple and would like to help float our hosting bill, just enter “lifeclever.com” in the “Referral domain” field when you sign-up. It’s definitely not required, and we”ll love you either way.

Are you a Mediatemple customer? Are you pleased with another hosting service? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Please no spam. It will be deleted.