MediaTemple is a web hosting and cloud services provider, since 1998. They are based in California and own operate data centers in Los Angeles, CA and Ashburn, VA. They are a relatively large web host hosting 1.5 million websites and has been listed in North America’s 30 big web hosting companies. MediaTemple offer a number of hosting solutions starting from cheap and scalable grid services to ultra powerful server solutions. They also offer a web builder solution for people with limited HTML skills and budget for web development.
Recently, MedaTemple was acquired by Godaddy, the biggest domain registrar and web host. Unlike most other acquisitions, Godaddy did not change anything about MediaTemple or brought them under Godaddy banner. MediaTemple still retains their identity and that is very much understandable considering the superior brand value and reputation of MediaTemple as a premium host.
The most popular plan by MediaTemple is their grid service "Grid" which can be seen as a direct competitor to traditional shared hosting in terms of price and resources, but brings in additional benefit of unlimited scalability. Sites hosted in shared hosts will have issues when they receive sudden bursts in traffic, which typically happens when one of the social media picks up your website and send in tons of visitors within a short period of time. Shared hosts could throttle the site, suspend it or even the whole server could stop responding. Theoretically cloud hosting would be able to handle any amount of such traffic without any issue, which is the biggest USP of hosts like MediaTemple (mt).
MediaTemple Features
MediaTemple offer six different type of services –
- Virb - a website builder solution for mom and pop sites. Now a separate company owned by MediaTemple.
- Shared Hosting -Grid which is a reasonably priced cloud based shared hosting.
- VPS - Virtual "DV Managed" and "DV Developer" which are basically business class cloud VPS, a scalable replacement for traditional VPS.
- Dedicated Hosting: Powerful dedicated servers under DV Dedicated and Developer Dedicated. When you have outgrown everything else, get dedicated hosting.
- WordPress Managed: A specialized Wordpress hosting with everything managed by Wordpress specialists.
- Managed Hosting: Affordable, scalable web hosting, fully managed.
Out of this, the most popular one is the shared hosting alternative, Grid which costs $20/month and above. The basic plan includes enough resources for sites with medium traffic and can handle traffic spikes without any issue. Resource usage is measured for processor use (grid cycles) as well as bandwidth usages and any additional usage is billed separately. While unlimited scalability is possible, there are protection mechanisms to ensure that clients do not get charged for any virus, DOS attacks etc, which can result in high CPU usage. Grid comes with a custom control panel, one click installers for popular scripts like wordpress, stats and usage information. While the control panel is not quite as good the typical cPanel, it is user friendly and good enough for most people.
Dedicated virtual servers "DV Managed" and "DV Developer" are also very popular and are excellent choice if you need more resources than the grid services. They also ensure better speed and uptime, since the resources are assured. Both are good enough as business VPS and dedicated virtual is better choice among them, being a managed service. They both use the popular Plesk control panel, which makes the server management easy. You can choose from 6 available setups, ranging from 1 GB ram to 32 GB. Upgrading the service to the next level is just a click of a button, since this is a cloud based service.
MediaTemple Coupon
MediaTemple Performance
A cloud host is expected to perform very well and provide nearly 100% uptime, which is one area where MediaTemple disappoints to a certain extend. The basic cloud hosting service, Grid is known to have occasional down time and is not different from what you get with normal shared hosts. Customers have experienced slow performance and occasional downtime, which MediaTemple have acknowledged and they even have compensated with free hosting up to one year, in the past. So do not expect Grid to be a lot different from shared hosting, except for the scalability. If you have a non critical website and you need scalability at reasonable cost, Grid is right for you.
The dedicated virtual "DV Managed" and "DV Developer" services are both better performers and are highly recommended replacements for traditional VPS and dedicated server. Even the cheapest DV Managed package should offer you nearly 100% uptime and consistent performance, if you do not mind the cost.
MediaTemple Price Value
MediaTemple is relatively expensive if you are comparing with shared hosting, but they reasonably priced among cloud based services. At $20/mo, Grid is one of the cheapest cloud hosting service you can get. Even the dedicated virtual servers say the same story, expensive compared to VPS but reasonably priced among cloud based hosts.
Looking for something cheaper than MediaTemple? Compare Prices Here.
MediaTemple Support
MediaTemple claim to have all US staff and is a very much customer friendly company. Normally, the support is fast and there is not much waiting time for phone support as well. There have been reports of tickets taking more than 24 hours to get reply, but these are exceptions and you can expect much faster service under normal operation. Customer support is not something you need to worry about if you are with MediaTemple.
MediaTemple Reviews Added By Users
Media Temple (Now Go Daddy) SUCKS!
Site Hosted: http://www.noneofyourbusiness.com
IP Address: 72.219.184.239
Media Temple SUCKS. Any good reviews are generally old reviews. They were purchased by GoDaddy, which should be your first red flag. THEY SUCK. I was migrating over 200 emails from one of my folders in my Media Temple email. I was sending them to my Google for Work email (which is way way better). It said it was done migrating but only sent over 26 emails out of the 228 emails is said it was sending to my email folder in Google email. And, the folder at Media Temple was empty! They obviously have IMAP server problems. Google had no problems on their end. They had no rational explanation for losing all my emails which I am required to keep, by law, for 7 years. And, they wanted to charge me $80 to retrieve the emails they lost. They finally caved and said they would not charge but then sat on their hands for hours until the next back up was completed at MT, erasing all my files that were sitting there awaiting retrieval. They do back ups every day at noon and midnight which erase all data from the day before. Can you say cheap? So, I they lost over 200 emails and said oops, sorry. Nothing we can do. We do not guarantee anything by way of data back ups. I guess that means they also are not trustworthy when they promise to retrieve the data they lost before they run the next back up and then do nothing. Idiots. Do not use MT. They are the worst. They are also very slow. My website speed doubled when I migrated my website to a new host. The service reps were arrogant, condescending, and apathetic. They sounded like robots, repeating their policies without addressing the real issue at hand. Just horrible. This last guy (Poncho) would not tell me who his supervisor was and indicated that this issue would not be further escalated (in a robotic tone, over and over again).
R, Orange County, CA on 2016-10-07
MediaTemple Comparison
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