Media Temple falters on 100% uptime promise

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

Media Temple Uptime November-December

Dreamhost

Dreamhost uptime November-December

A Small Orange

A Small Orange uptime November-December

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.

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9 responses

  1. I find it more accurate when I monitor sites from multiple sources. SITE24X7.com and monitor.us both of which are free services. I been monitoring both dreamhost and mediatemple hosted websites and have failed to see why mediatemple is better. Though I been hearing a lot of good stuff about Asmallorange 🙂

  2. Just a question, who would you perfer, DreamHost or A Small Orange?

  3. Scribez,
    I haven’t tried site24x7.com, what I use are siteuptime.com and mon.itor.us and I find that mon.itor.us is able to catch more downtimes.

    Christopher,
    Right now, I’d choose A Small Orange. But let me qualify my opinion on that by saying that I haven’t tried Dreamhost hosting yet: but I continually monitor the uptime performance of a blog hosted there. I’m also very satisfied with my shared hosting account with A Small Orange. It’s support staff are very quick to act on problems.

  4. Hosting problems aside, Merry Christmas, Max!

  5. Hi Dom,
    Thanks and have a merry Christmas too. 🙂

  6. Just a question Mr. Limpag, did you bcc my email address for me to recieve a notification about this thread?

    thanks..

  7. Hi Max,

    Are you still with ASO?

  8. Forrest,
    Yes, I’m still with ASmallOrange but under a bigger plan. I’m quite satisfied with its service.

  9. Thank for sharing and updates.

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