Media Temple, in the first days after launching its widely-hyped GridServer hosting, seemed to deliver on its grandiose 100% uptime promise. The figures I was getting in early monitoring of Media Temple uptime, and a host of other web hosting services, was tempting me to sign up with them for a project that was still at an early stage.

I’ve since changed my mind. I will be using my current web host, the dependable A Small Orange, for the new project. MediaTemple has apparently failed to sustain its 100% availability, based on my monitoring using mon.itor.us and the posts of scores of its own customers. The downtime was significant that it generated an article in Netcraft.

And even if it got good http uptime performance for several days, there were a lot of complaints regarding Media Temple’s database connections, a huge issue for those that depend on PHP/MySQL scripts, such as WordPress, to run their websites.

Media Temple’s launch of the GridServer was accompanied by such a loud marketing buzz one of its officers even told Mike Arrington in an interview he was thinking of actually paying customers, on top of granting rebates, whenever there is a downtime in “The Last Hosting Plan You’ll Ever Need.”

Weeks after the launch and the promise is unraveling. Here are the uptime data of my monitoring of the services of Media Temple, Dreamhost and A Small Orange. This monitoring is by no means exhaustive. I just monitored websites I’ve confirmed to be using a particular web host’s service.

MediaTemple

Dreamhost

A Small Orange

The Nov. 18 “downtime” (the blank column you see in my Media Temple and A Small Orange monitoring) isn’t really one as I can confirm my blog was up this day. I think the problem is with mon.itor.us.