TechCast Reviews

29th April 2009

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Since I endorsed the switch to Media Temple’s (gs) Grid-Service hosting package at the beginning of this year, I felt that I should share my experience in the short time I’ve been with them. In fact I’ve felt compelled to write this article.

To me, writing about the hosting platform for your website is much like writing about the electricity company you use. You just don’t! They’re there, they do their thing, they provide you with a service. Sure, they have problems every now and again, but overall they’re doing their job and you’re glad that you don’t need to talk to them that often.

So when the frequency of my communications with Media Temple started to increase, I had to take a step back and take a look at why this is happening. To try and identify the problem and how moving forward, it can be resolved.

Late last year and the beginning of this year, TechCast News and TechCast Reviews received a large surge in traffic. At the time, I was with another hosting provider and although I was happy with them, they didn’t have the infrastructure to keep my sites running during times of peak traffic. No sweat, I’m a reasonable guy. I expect service to be proportional to the cost and I wasn’t paying that much.

Fortunately, this was a time approaching the end of my contract for renewal with the provider so I felt that this was a good opportunity to explore other options and find something that would suit the needs for the future growth of TechCast Network.

Ultimately, Media Temple offered the best package at the best price for what I wanted, with plenty of redundancy and capability that will allow TechCast Network to grow. And indeed it did. The range of sites grew and I was able to provide more services such as High-Def video streaming for some of my video reviews, hosting images internally, creating new lighthouse projects and more.

So the transition went very smoothly and during the switchover, there was very minimal downtime. A positive start indeed, I thought. However, after about a month on Media Temple’s servers, the problems started to appear. By the end of February, I had logged two support tickets, which I chalked up to initial setup issues and the expectation that things like this are bound to happen in any ‘new home’.

However, it’s now coming up to the end of April and I’ve logged a total of 10 support tickets since beginning hosting with Media Temple. If you consider that five of these have been logged in April alone, you can start to build a picture of the frustration and anger that each of these ten tickets cause. It’s never a good day when you got hosting problems.

And it’s not been just one issue re-occurring over and over again, it’s a different problem each time which just adds to the frustration and eats away at the trust and confidence you have in the boxes that your websites are being hosted on.

So being realistic, am I asking too much of Media Temple? Don’t get me wrong here. I honestly don’t believe anyone can realistically provide 100% uptime across all services, but I sure do expect something a lot closer to what I’ve been experiencing and I definitely expect service quality to be proportional to cost. No matter how you slice it, Media Temple aren’t exactly cheap. TechCast Network is paying several times more than what I was paying with the previous hosts and yet collectively, there have been more problems with Media Temple than I’ve ever experienced with all of my hosting providers in the past three to four years.

So what has been good? Media Temple has provided a reasonable level of up time of the websites, whether it be through caching or whatever, the sites have been available. Some would argue that is the most critical part of the service you’re getting. I agree. But when you’re running an organisation like TechCast Network, there’s a whole bunch of services involved in keeping it running, and that includes access to its databases, it’s reporting and it’s email. Without those, we’re dead in the water.

Media Temple has been quick to respond to issues, usually within 24 hours and sometimes within a few hours of submitting a ticket. They’re also responding to messages via Twitter and I believe they’re helping customers to extradite their support requests – all smart companies should be doing this regardless of whether it’s right to do it or not. So sometimes, problems are fixed before my support ticket is even answered. That’s certainly a strength of their support team and credit goes to them for that. But (there’s always a but), I think that’s missing the point. Fantastic, there’s support when you need it. The question is, why am I needing it so often?

So my questions that I put forward to Media Temple are:

What’s the real reason why I am having to log all of these support tickets?
Are you straining over the amount of customers you got and problems are cropping up due to the stress on your infrastructure?
Is it issues with your technical teams, are you under-staffed, are you lacking in monitoring tools?

Just tell me and your customers what the real deal is, and why these problems are happening. When a company like this is experiencing so many problems with their service, there’s an expectation for a level of transparency that I’m just not getting right now.