A very long time ago I was planning on moving to a grid hosting platform, and planned on using a company called Mosso. I never got to the second part of my write up because I never ended up trusting Mosso enough to move all of my sites over. At the time Mosso was having all sorts of troubles with up times, email, and managing their services. I have not looked into the company since, so I can not say if these troubles continue.
Lately I have been once again looking to make the move to grid hosting. Grid hosting offers a lot of benefits, one of them being cost. The cost for me will be over a 50% savings, and you can not argue with those numbers.
My company of choice this time around is Media Temple. You might have heard of them, if not check them out they are a great company. They host very large websites like TechCrunch. I am very excited about this move for several reasons:
- The cost savings
- The scalability factor
- Getting back on the LAMP stack
- The ability to use both PHP 4 and 5 (I hate that some things still do not support 5)
- Support for Ruby on Rails. I would love to start developing in Ruby again, and am stoked that I now not only have a host that supports it, but encourages it.
Media Temple has their act together. Sign up was a breeze, activation was very fast. Little to no problems at this point. This post is being written on the new hosting platform. One thing I have noticed is images are slow to load here at Code and Coffee, but I am not sure that this is not related to the ISP I am on at the moment.
I will continue to let everyone know how the transition goes. Smooth sailing so far.
I am actually doing pretty much the same route right now. I started with Mosso early this year, thinking they were at the tail end of their problems. But I was continually frustrated with problems provisioning accounts and with the slowness of php and mysql processing.
I’ve just started moving some sites over to MediaTemple now. I’m still very young in my mediatemple experience, but so far it has been the same as what you have reported. Everything just works exactly as advertised. My sites have been provisioned instantly, php executes quickly. Under one account I have a (gs) and under another account I have a (dv). The (gs) is more than twice as fast as Mosso. And the (dv) is about twice as fast as the (gs), in my rough benchmarks using pingdom.com and mon.itor.us.
My one complaint about mediatemple (gs) is that their spam protection doesn’t seem to catch spam very well. They give you a slider: 1-10, with 1 being the most restrictive. I had it set at 3, and about 40% of my spam was still reaching me. Plus at that level it tagged some legitimate mail as spam. But anyway, this won’t be an issue for you since you’ll be using gmail.
Surprisingly, the brightest good spot of Mosso is their email service.
Glad to hear you are having success as well. I really like Media Temple so far. It almost seemed too easy. It’s nice not to have to worry about resource usage, PHP and MySQL optimization.
I was looking at their DV services, but the GS is just too darn cheap. I guess if I ever start peaking resources I will have to upgrade. And that is the other nice thing, they said it is a painless on lick image upgrade from GS to DV. That is nice. My old host would have to setup an new VPS and I would have to re-customize everything.
I really like it when technology just works, and it works as advertised.