Alternate To Media Temple (GS) And A Small Orange For Multiple Low-traffic Php Sites
Oct 31, 2009
I host about 30 sites for clients who don't want to manage their own hosting. All of the sites are low-traffic. Almost all use FrogCMS or Wordpress /w minify and cacheing options. All of my clients use Google Apps for email.
I guess I'm looking for a reasonable host (nothing unlimited) more storage than ASO would be nice - I'm looking from something from $10-20 monthly and I can purchase for a year at a time.
Sharkspace, downtown host and host gator seem a little "dreamhost-like"... but have good reviews.
Also, I'm in Montreal so a datacenter on the east-coast would be nice
How did A Small Orange get the name? Years ago Tim Dorr, owner/operator, used it as his AYM screen name. There's a great interview with him from 2005 here. Even have a look around if you want.
"A Small Orange" is an Atlanta based web hosting company with a great attitude. It began as my backup host for my web based voiceover site and now it is my main host. I first read about them on this forum where they came highly recommended. When I first joined they would only accept 25 new accounts a night to ensure the best customer experience.
It took me two nights to get mine and I'm still there. Don't worry, they haven't done that in years and you can sign up any time.
The first thing I check when selecting a new host are their forums. A Small Orange (ASO) has a very active one that has "support" members who post, and even Tim himself. "Pre-sales Questions" is a popular area.
Not that this takes the place of a superb tech support who won't quit until the problem is solved. I've found them to be very patient with folks who may not be the most tech savvy. That would be me. There is a thorough Knowledge base online as well as an ASO Wiki written by staff and customers. Plus, step by step demonstrations of CPanel functions. The only issue I've ever had happened a couple of weeks ago. I had a problem with a disappearing sub domain. It was a CPanel code problem. Tech support was nothing short of amazing.
Their plans are very reasonable. All have the same features. Even their "Tiny plan" with 75 MB of space and 3GB Bandwidth at $25 a year has all the features of their most expensive "Super plan" with 4500MB of space and 100GB Bandwidth. Turn any account (except Tiny) into a Reseller account for $5 more a month. You can easily upgrade or downgrade as needed. Plus there's ASO Extreme which is just for file sharing. No scripts, e-mail or Cpanel. But, you get 1500MB of space and 100GB Bandwidth for $20 a month.
As far as up time, I don't think my site has ever been down for longer than a few minutes. The time I caught it they were doing some server maintenance. I'm always on my site since one of my web pages is my browser start page. I've hosted two sites with them, one for me and one for a local band. They were on different servers and both had the same great performance and reliability. ASO's business concept is to not overload shared servers. Period. I can go online any time and check my hosts status from a web site and CPanel. If there's any problem it's corrected quickly.
ASO offers CPanel and the latest updates and features. I like to check my stats often and use a lot of subdomains. Latest Visitors and AWStats helps me keep tabs of things. It has everything you'd expect from CPanel.
Believe me, I'm no expert. But, I do recognize a friendly attitude and willingness to help when I see it. The most important thing is that my web site up and online. If it didn't work well and consistently, I wouldn't be there. If that ever changes you can bet I'll be the first to leave. So far I am very impressed with A Small Orange.
I manage and develop an e-commerce site which the original designer had put on Media Temple. Their grid service and general marketing looks and sounds superb. This is no doubt why a lot of people go with them.
For months now they have been giving my client problems. People in certain places can't access the site because MT are always up to tricks moving the servers around. On top of that their MySQL performance has latency issues which makes most pages load slowly. I decided to move the site to Knownhost(vps) who seem to offer good service at a reasonable price. Before I could even begin to transfer the emails to the new server I get reports that the site has been down for over 24 hours. The site is still down after a whole day. This means my client can't sell their stuff and I can't transfer to the new host either.
I called MT and they offered free hosting for a year. I don't think it's worth it. The uptime and service and performance I've seen has been no better than $5/month shared hosting. For a site like this I don't think it's worth risking uptime (and therefore sales) on a company that can't get their act together. I've never had downtime from any other host before, let alone multiple times like MT.
I'm putting this out there just to warn any people who may be thinking of going to Media Temple.
I would be interested to know others experiences with Media Temple.
We purchased a EV Certificate: [url]and have tried to install it on Media Temple.
However there are 4 parts to it and can not work out how to get it to work, we tried their user panel and still tells us key is invalid. Tried the Media Temple helpdesk and they have no idea either.
They really have an ideal plan for me with their grid service. But I wanted any recent customer views on them, before I make my mind up about going with them for hosting.
Also if you don't think Media Temple is good can you provide someone who is?
I have been reading this forum all night now. And I'm just clueless still as to who would be good enough to go with. I don't want to make a wrong decision. I would prefer something with 10Gb or over not fussed on the cpanel or bandwidth as long as they have good support and are efficient. Also my budget is around the $20-$25 bracket.
I am currently hosting with Media Temple, but I completely hate plesk, and want cPanel on the server. I have even considered going to Mosso, but too expensive for what I need.
Here is my question, I have a (dv) server with MT, and am wondering, can I put cPanel on there instead of Plesk. I tried to search their knowledge base with no luck. I am currently on hold waiting for tech support, but I still have about 17 minutes so I figured I may get a quicker response here.
I have been hosting with (mt) Media Temple for six months now and would like to provide my independent review of their service.
My Background/Potential BiasesSix years hosting experience with other various companies Ten years working in the computer industry Former employee of the world's sixth-largest hosting company, The Planet (source: Netcraft) hackmysql.com, of which a few people have heard Therefore, I have been on both sides of hosting, as an engineer and a customer. My review is written as a customer, but I have certain sympathies for the engineers at Media Temple.
Services I use at Media Temple(gs) Grid-Service (the basic package) MySQL GridContainer LITE
Review Overall, I am very pleased with the service at Media Temple. From reading other threads here on WHT, I know that (mt) had a rough start with their Grid-Service. These problems, however, were before my time with (mt).
One Major Problem Since I began hosting with them, I have had only one major problem, which I helped caused. In October there were "storage issues", which is the nice way of saying, "the hard drive ran out of free space." The partition where my home directory resides had about 2G of free space before I began working with some 2G log files. Thus I helped create those storage issues.
I don't know (mt)'s storage policy and practices, but I suspect that they were not expecting those free 2G to disappear so suddenly. Therefore, I take a little of the fault, because my sudden burst of disk usage did cause problems for everyone else on that partition.
Otherwise, my six months with Media Temple have been without problem. Since I have a technical background, I am not inclined to create support tickets often, but I have created three.
Support Tickets The first was for a mail/DNS issue. Before an (mt) Grid-Service (gs) server will handle mail for a domain, the server must see that the domain's MX record resolves to itself. This is a sensible precaution. Problem for me was: the server hosting my domains was lagging behind every other server in DNS resolution. (mt)'s primary DNS servers were correct, as were all other outside DNS servers, but my particular (gs) server was not resolving properly and therefore would not enable mail for one of my domains. The response I received to my inquiry about this "problem" was a stock response that said, basically, "Wait; DNS takes time." Of course I already knew this but I was hoping that the tech would maybe refresh the DNS daemon on my (gs) server to move the DNS propagation process along more quickly.
Second support ticket was due to the store issues mentioned previously. Their response was quick and apologetic, even though I helped to create the very problem I was inquiring about.
Third ticket was a request for a Perl module. The ticket was escalated to a higher level of support which installed the module. Engineers are cautious about doing things that effect the entire server. Even though a Perl module is very small and harmless, I'm glad that this request was done quickly and without question.
Shell I am a heavy shell and vi user. I won't host at a place that doesn't have excellent shell access. Media Temple's shell access is excellent and has no silly restrictions. Certain commands are blocked for the security/privacy of others (or perhaps due to how they implement their grid), but I have not yet encountered a problem with the shell.
Most importantly, I demand super-low latency because even a little latency creates a terrible lag when typing quickly in a shell. Although my (gs) server is somewhere in California and I live in Europe, I very rarely experience any lag due to latency, and that's pretty impressive for a transatlantic, 7,000+ mile link.
My (gs) server runs Debian so the shell is nothing crazy and (mt) has not made any modifications to it that I can see. Therefore, the shell feels proper and like "home".
Control Panel/"AccountCenter" Media Temple has developed its own web control panel, called the AccountCenter, for (gs) accounts. (The dedicated-virtual service uses Plesk.) Overall, it's a good control panel, easy to use and understand, with a simple layout. It should be noted that I'm not the kind of person who does everything through the control panel. Regardless, I have never had a functional problem with it--that means it has always done what I expected it to, without weird or unexpected results.
It lacks only one feature as far as my needs are concerned: domain aliases. How to add domain aliases through the AccountCenter confused me a little. If I have domain.com and I want all traffic at foo.com to transparently access domain.com then accomplishing that in the AccountCenter is less than intuitive in my opinion. When I had this problem, I discovered that I had to create both as two separate domains, then remove the foo.com directory and create a symbolic link from foo.com -> domain.com. I could have left the foo.com directory and then added some HTTP redirects or mod rewrites, but the symbolic link is much more elegant. They do have an article in the knowledge base about how to do this, but for people who manage their account entirely through the control panel and FTP, it's not pleasant to SSH, vi .htaccess, rm -rf, and ln -s, etc.
A further criticism about the AccountCenter is that it seems to run slowly from time to time. Even when the shell is quick (therefore, I know it's not a matter of transatlantic lag), the AccountCenter responds and moves slowly. Perhaps my little laptop is too slow to quickly render the pretty, graphical, dynamic windows and such. This is a superficial problem though because it doesn't affect the service of websites or database or anything else.
MySQL As hackmysql.com suggests, MySQL and database connectivity is very important to me. I am skeptical of shared MySQL servers because of the "bad neighbor effect." This, however, is what (mt) intended its MySQL GridContainer service to overcome.
Secondly, I am skeptical of remote MySQL servers in massively shared hosting environments. Yes, it is good to have the database servers separate from the web servers, but in massively shared hosting environments there is a risk of web server to database server lag due to the internal network being saturated with other traffic (web, mail, ftp, streaming audio/video, ddos attacks, etc.). A few milliseconds of network lag means a few milliseconds longer that the query appears to take.
Therefore, I was skeptical of (mt)'s MySQL GridContainer at first for these two reasons (bad neighbor and network lag), but I have been pleasantly surprised by its performance. I don't know how they have built their grid, but my MySQL server performs as if it were local, and I have never experienced the bad neighbor effect. Perhaps I got lucky and I'm on a MySQL server with few other users, or perhaps their MySQL GridContainer really is doing its job well and keeping my database activity isolated from everyone else. I'm not really interested in the implementation, just the result, and the result has been excellent for the last six months.
My only criticism in this respect is: why is only MySQL 4.1 available (and PostgreSQL)? That version is no longer developed and 5.0 is a well established GA release. There is a knowledge base article that says they are planning to offer other versions of MySQL but there is no planned date for this "feature." My suggestion: make it a priority. Unless there is a very deep technical obstacle, there is no excuse to not be offering 5.0.
Two Random Criticisms Webmail: I wish they offered more choices. I like SquirrelMail, but if I had an easier, better choice, I'd use it. They do offer a nice, advanced knowledge base article on redirecting webmail to a 3rd part app. I could do this but, I'm lazy , I just want to click a button inside the AccountCenter to choose a diffrent webmail app. Furthermore, like the AccountCenter, SquirrelMail runs slowly from time to time. I would really like this to be improved. Perhaps SquirrelMail is just a slow app; again, I don't care about implementation, I just want a faster, nicer webmail.
Raw Apache/httpd logs: Every host handles these differently. Since I don't like any of the normal webstat programs (including Urchin which comes free with (gs) accounts), I wrote and use my own, therefore, I need access to the httpd logs. Problem with (mt) in this respect: all domains are in one log. My understanding is that this is due to some technical limitation. It's not a huge problem, because I can parse and separate each of my domain's traffic myself, but it would be nice if (mt) would do this already for me.
Conclusion Despite the "grid chaos" in the past, I think Media Temple today is a solid, reliable solution. I waited half a year to write this review because I wanted to acquire a good average of experience. As the review has shown, the average of my experience with Media Temple is overwhelmingly positive.
In six months, the only one major problem I've had was partly caused by myself. Although I have criticized certain parts of the service, like running MySQL 4.1 and slow SquirrelMail, these criticisms are mostly superficial. What matters most is that my service with Media Temple--my websites, databases, and shell access--has been rapid and reliable.
Although I can easily migrate the databases and website data, I am not certain what I should do with emails, as I have four clients whom all use emails.
I currently own a reasonably sized VPS paying around 40/$80 a month for it. I am extremely happy with the service but I have recently move from freelance to being hired by a company.
I wish to scale down my costs so looking at other options.
I hear a lot (mostly good) of things about MT and was wondering what peoples experiences are - particular with ease of use, support and uptime.
I would also like to know about how the normal shared hosting option works for people hosting some clients website and email. I currently have around 10 clients hosting with me and 100 emails. Is it easy for clients to use and i assume pop and imap are supported.
I currently run my VPS on cpanel. would it be easy to transfer everything or is it very much of a manual job?
I am a customer of Yahoo Small Business unlimited hosting. I am running Joomla (CMS) with jreviews which uses PHP and MySQL. I now need to expand my review and rating website to earn some profits. According to my business plan, I would need atleast a 1000-2000 unique visitors a day to actually earn off the website to afford a VPS. My question is, can Yahoo Small Business "Unlimited" hosting plan sustain that number under the usage of Joomla? I have been trying to find an answer to this for a long long time but to no avail. I know that "unlimited" is actually a marketing tactic and that one must move to VPS or Dedicated servers for serious traffic. But I cannot move to a VPS before I earn something from the website initially due to lack of funds. Can I expect to be tension free till the range of 1000-2000 uniques/day?
For hosting smaller sites 10-20 pages with low niche traffic would it be better to host them individually on small hosting plans or would it be to your advantage to host themt together on a dedicated server?
Does anyone know of a hosting Linux package (must be UK based) that has the usuals (PHP, MySQL, subdomains, email, Apache ModRewrite) that is geared towards hosting lots of low bandwidth sites?
I use several great hosters but they limit the amount of addon domains or charge you through the roof for extra ones. I'm thinking a package that will let me do 15 - 25 domains. More would be a bonus. The bandwidth allowance is not a problem. A lot of my customers' sites use less than 100 MB a month.
We are consolidating several of our servers (6-8) into one location. Collectively, they'll probably use about 15-20 Mbps. We'd like to keep all of our VoIP traffic on premium bandwidth, but the rest of the servers (web, mail, etc) on something like Cogent.
My question is this: Is there anyway to keep it all on one switch/router but be able to specify certain IPs or MAC addresses to use a specific provider? Is BGP the only option? It would be nice to be able to have that level of control. If BGP is the only way, it doesn't yet seem realistic on this scale.
I'm proably being completely overzealous, and should just stick with two Layer 2 switches (one for each provider) and put each machine on one or the other, then setup a seperate VLAN for them to talk to each other. However, we'll probably be hosting servers for customers in the near future so having a router wouldn't hurt, we could use the traffic shaping, QoS, etc. in the long run.
hosting solution for 3 very high traffic blogs, all running on WordPress.
I have been researching dedicated and I came across a couple posts where people recommended Clustered hosting over Dedicated for better handling high traffic DB driven sites in the times of Digg or Slashdot frontpage exposure.
I would like your feedback, and your opinion on what to choose from the following options:
1. Netfirms Enterprise III (Clustered)
2. ResellerZoom Failover (Clustered)
3. LiquidWeb Dedicated Webmaster Series (Dedi w/ 2GB DDR and a 3Ghz Intel Hyperthreaded)
i currently have 2 webhosting providers but want to consolidate to one acct at one host with a bit better load times...
1. JaguarPc - i have two accts with them
a. i have a shared acct with them currently - i believe its called the gigadeal (something like $10 a month). i have been with them since 2000, pretty decent host not too much downtime. support is "ok" when needed. currently i have 3 smallish websites hosted on this one acct, they dont get a lot of traffic. two of them are using wordpress one is just a static html site. i did a look up and found the server has about 130 sites hosetd on it. so not too bad in regards to overselling. however my big problem is the site takes about 900-1500ms to generate a page. this seems to be pretty often. again the sites dont really draw that much traffic. so thats not the problem here.
b. i also have one of their freedom vps accts with upgraded ram and bandwidth. i only have one site hosted on it. this site used to get about 500K+ unique visitors a month. at its peak we were serving around 1tb bandwidth a month... i know we ran the vps hard but considering we wanted to stay under $50 it worked well. there was of course some downtime due to the massive traffic - [we serve up a popular flash cartoon website].
2. Hostgator - babygator plan this host only serves up one wordpress site - the site isnt very well known yet, but the site is growing each month. the funny thing is that when i looked up this server there was about 830 websites hosted on it - obviously oversold and crowded. support really sucks here imho. however, the page load time is anywhere between 250ms to 500ms a lot faster than JaguarPcs. which is crazy since jag has much less sites on the server... im looking to basically consolidate the websites that are on both shared plans. my original thought was to keep them all on my shared hosting acct at jaguarpc (the one with the 3 sites). obviously i cannot add them to the vps since its pretty active. also the vps is business and the other sites are all personal. and i dont want them to mix so to speak.
i am currently spending about $20 a month between the two shared host plans. im looking for some recommendations as to where to move -- where speed isnt such a big problem, and i can maintain one acct. it would be great if i could host these sites all for around $20 - hopefully without much lag.
was thinking mediatemple - but after reading so many negative posts here about them - im not sure...
Just getting started with IIS on Windows XP Pro. One thing I have a question about is why don't I have an option to 'create new website' when I right click on the Web Sites node? Am I only allowed to use Default Web Site? Also, I know it's not a rights issue because I'm logged in as administrator.
I'm looking at IIS on our server which has Windows Server 2003. On that machine I can create multiple web sites by right clicking on the Web Sites node? Is this just not an option with XP Pro?
I currently have few websites hosted for few of my clients over different hosting providers which include from godaddy to other small hosts. I have been thinking about switching them over to a VPS.
After reading lot of threads on the WHT forum, i have decided to stick with wiredtree. Now for the questions.
1. Wiredtree is a managed VPS server right? that means they install the OS and apache and other applications that are essential to running a site. (not talking about blog software and stuff just basic server software)
2. Do i need to have a Reseller software that lot of them are providing for billing and stuff? I bill my clients myself and take the money upfront. There are no monthly billing and stuff. I dont want to sell the hosting to anyone else then the clients that i pick. Keeping this in mind do i still need the above mentioned software.
3. If i dont get the reseller software for billing and stuff, can i still host multiple websites and have their own control panel and stuff. Basically i want to give every client a username and password where they can log on and add/remove mail accounts, create ftp accounts and etc.
4. If i dont have the reseller software can i still specify different configurations options for different clients, like client 1 has 4gb of space and 50gb of bandwidth?
Right now I have maybe 6 personal sites that I keep on my new VPS. They are mixed together in the public_html file. Ex: coolsite.com and anothersite.com are found in public_html/coolsite/ and public_html/anothersite/ so the result is somewhat messy with many folders. What is the proper way to add sites so I have access to each site separately so it is not so cluttered? Or am I doing this right?
I have three sites running on three separate servers behind a single router with DDWRT. One of the servers is a Windows 2003 server that I have DNS running on.
Each domain name points to my public static IP address.
My router is set to use the windows 2003 server as the DNS server.
I have port 80 forwarding to the windows 2003 server.
I can access the sharepoint site that is on the 2003 server from outside my network and within it without any problems.
When I try to access one of the other two sites from outside the network, i get a 400 error. When I try to access the same sites from within the network, they work fine.
