how much i love 'em! their control panel is great, even better than cpanl. i've had lots of web hosts that use cpanel, cpanel is good though, but sometimes has some limitations. metdiatemple's control panel offers more flexibility. i just upgraded to dedicated server few days back. hope they do well.
After a year of subscription with MT, I am moving my sites elsewhere. Despite all the good reviews on the net, which drawn me into signing up with MT in the first place, MT is disappointing overall. The server is sluggish and there's occasional down time. When I brought the problem up to MT's support team, they were quick to response but that's about it. The subsequent replies would be there they were working on it. The server would also froze sometimes when I'm doing backups, for no reason. The great interface is probably the only thing I would miss after moving elsewhere.
they r the best virtual dedicated server i've ever used. every single penny is well paid! server is ultra fast, n support response is great! help resolved my problems in just few tickets!
I have many clients who use MT services for their websites. Some experience:
Grid-Service (gs): PHP 4 is the default handler, but from the control panel you can switch to PHP 5 with one click. Versions: PHP 5.2.6, MySQL 4.1.11, Apache 2.0.54. The control panel is a custom made one.
Dedicated-Virtual (dv): The control panel is Plesk. Since you have control on the whole virtual system, you can install anything, so I think there is no need to say more.
Support for (gs) and (dv): The sales department is a bit slow, many times I had to wait more than a day, sometimes I had to call them by phone. The response time of technical support is between 4 and 8 hours, sometimes they answer in an hour, but sometimes I have to wait more than 8 hours. Their support system has levels which means if you open a support ticket, first a not so experienced technical contact tries to answer your question, and if he can't, he will raise your ticket to a higher level technical support. That's why sometimes you talk to three people when finally an expert helps you.
What MT offers is good, they have really experience in web hosting, I think MT is a good choice. But it has a serious disadvantage, there is no backup for (gs) and there is limited backup for (dv). Let's start with (gs). There is no option to automatically backup your site for example daily, they don't care with it, you need to make backups manually. The only way to automatically backup your site is writing a shell script and setting it up to cron. For a beginner user this may be impossible, even for users who have some experience. For (dv) you can use Plesk to back up your site and it works perfectly. But for your (dv) you can order a so-called Snapshot Backup add-on, which means you back up your whole file system with one click, not only your web folder, really the whole file system. The disadvantage of this is the same, there is no way to do this automatically.
So the summary, I think MT is a good choice, but because of the limited backup options (which are really important for a website) I would suggest to look at also what Rochen offers, you get hourly backup of your site, they have only certified technical support members and I get answer within minutes. As I remember the longest time I had to wait for an aswer was approximately 30 minutes.
I love mediaTemple, their GS service has had its occasional issues with reliability (and they are slightly more pricey then its competition) but their control panel, upgrade paths and overall service is so much better than anything else I have used. Simply put... I trust (mt) and have nothing but good things to say about them.
I am a current MT customer, on their Grid Service plan. I've been a customer of theirs for a few years. At first, their service was great, and in many ways, it still is. However, for the past 6 months or more, my sites and emails are down SEVERAL TIMES PER WEEK. They have many excuses, but have never once helped me to at least get some sort of refund for the massive amount of downtime I've experienced.
A year ago, I would completely recommend MT. Now, I unfortunately cannot. In fact, right now, my sites (and all my customers' sites) are down, including my emails. Basically meaning, I cannot conduct my business. Overall, MT has cost me alot of money, business, and un-needed stress.
Hate to be the only bearer of bad news here, but I figured y'all should know this from a current (extremely frustrated) customer.
I'm going to check out other hosting providers now.
UPDATE:
Spoke w/ Jerry over at MT, and he was very helpful and will be assisting me on moving my sites to a different cluster. The cluster I'm on apparently has the bulk of problems, which may be why some people have no (or very little) problems w/ down time. As usual, the customer service at MT is very friendly and helpful, however I needed to "threaten" legal action to get them to jump. I hope this switch-over will ease my MT woes, but we'll see. I know not to get too hopeful
I use their grid service to run an SMF forum, a few client sites running WP or Joomla, and I've only good things to report.
1. The forum was on an old shared hosting account, and even though it sees low activity it was constantly plagued by timeouts and general bad service. The speed on the grid service is more than adequate for my forum and I've rarely encountered a problem.
2. Advance warning of possible problems from mt is superb, unlike my other previous host who would simply post another article in their wiki when maintenance was being scheduled.
3. Any service-wide problems or outages are jumped on and an email is promptly sent to customers with good information & a timescale for recovery. Again this was not the case at a previous host I used.
4. Never needed to contact support because their documentation is good and usually things run without a problem (for example when I had to roll-back a database on the old host, I had major issues and lousy support) on mt things like this are a breeze and it is the same installing any scripts... things just seem to go right.. rather than go wrong. (Layman's terms, I know )
Anyway, that's just my input on this - hope that helps anyone making a decision.
