Media Temple - Outage For Over A Day
May 6, 2009
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.
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Oct 25, 2007
Recently I bought a hosting on MediaTemple. My previous site index file is index.php. But when I uploaded my site to MediaTemple it can not see it.
Where can I set default index file for MediaTemple? I need to change it to index.php instead of the index.html.
Please don't redirect me to MT support, they are too slow.
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Aug 15, 2008
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.
Does anyone have experience installing these?
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Apr 23, 2008
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.
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Apr 29, 2008
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.
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Aug 16, 2007
I am thinking about hosting with Media Temple's Dedicated Virtual Server. What's everyone's experience with them like? If not Media Temple,
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Dec 9, 2007
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.
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Feb 10, 2007
Iīm currently searching for a new ISP. At the moment Iīve got plans at two different companies in Germany.
They are OK in relation to service, performance and availability. Their technical features are so-so.
One of them is annoying me because they have two different control panels which really suck...
Some time ago I ordered two domains and then an new plan. I wanted to move the domains to it and that was really hard.
... and for one I had to pay twice. ... in future I want to start many new projects and thatīs not a good basis, isnīt it?
OK, Media Temple sounds really good. The features are stunning and their website is much better.
If your are located in Europe or especially in Germany - what are your experiences with mt?
Is performance and availability ok? What about support, payment and legal stuff?
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Jul 1, 2009
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.
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Jun 17, 2007
I've got my www.domain.com with Media Temple, but I can't seem to figure out how to create a [url] url with my server.
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Jan 12, 2009
how's media temple these days?
In particular the grid service.
Does their service stay up? How often is it down? I heard a lot of horror stories back in the day, and went with another provider.
Sadly, my current provider has had a string of downtime each day and I'm looking to switch.
Before I go with another provider, i want to make sure that MT's grid service is good.
And how it would compare with their dedicated virtual service.
Especially when you consider their dedicated virtual service compared to the gs with a mysql container.
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Oct 18, 2008
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?
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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
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Mar 7, 2009
Anyone elses sites offline I just lost over 20 colos all at once.
FDC site and CRM seems down.
NM Edit seems to be back now seems like a 5minute outage.
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Jul 18, 2008
I can't reach our servers, or LiquidWeb's site.
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Apr 9, 2009
I had a 12 hours outage in one of my VPS. According to the report of my provider, a maintenance task reported an error on the fsck Linux command.
Now I wonder if this error can occur on any RAID hard disk subsystem? Should I stay with this company?
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Apr 2, 2008
I have been reading the manual for a while, and I'm still not quite sure if I can do this with AP7930.
After power outage, I don't want all outlet to power on at the same time when the power is restored. Maybe 30-90 second gap between outlet power should suffice.
for example :
00s - power restored, port #1 on
30s - port #2 on
1m - port#3 on
1m30s - port#4 on
... and so on
The only option I see in the settings is "Power On Delay". I'm not sure if this delay only applies when I submit "On Delayed" action, or does it also apply to when the power from the provider is restored.
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Mar 8, 2009
Anyone else notice the huge outage at Surpass? My sites went down as I was editing one, and checking the server status returns a very, very long list of downed servers. Since the Surmunity Forums appear to be down as well, I was wondering if anyone here had found out what was up via other means, and whether or not there is any estimate on when it might come back up.
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Jun 28, 2008
my freebsd server suffered power outage and now at boot it shows
BIOS installed successfully!
strike F1 to continue, strike F2 to go to setup utility.
FreeBSD installed
Default 0,a (o.a)boot loaded
Boot:
But that is it, it does not respond to ping or ssh?
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Aug 16, 2008
I'm kind of annoyed. Not so much the server outage; I know those happen.
What is annoying me is the inability to get anyone on the phone.
I've been calling each of their 4 numbers in succession for the last 45 minutes. Finally connected with someone who has no idea what's going on, only that it is allegedly affecting their entire customer base. Man, if you're not going to answer the phone, at least put on a voice message, or maybe a banner on your Account Manager page.
their site didn't go down, just the ones they are hosting.
I'm a newbie at this so, for the vets, if you are experiencing a server outage, how long do you give your hosting company to give you an answer before getting "assertive" on the phone.
It's not a big deal to me since currently I only use my site for email. However, there must be some folks losing a bit of cash by being out of commission for an extended period of time.
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May 2, 2008
On the 30th we experienced downtime on a colocated server in a UK DC we did not know about it till late afternoon
when we finally got to access the server
we found the OS was corrupt
we found 2 of 4 hard drives apparently trashed
we found the backup also corrupt
so can we claim as its a mechanical failure on the DCs end?
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Jun 22, 2008
To make a long story short, as a consequence of the outage we lost some of our advertisers, and right now we cannot afford our old server. We decided well in advance to delete our server, so early this week we contacted the customer care and asked when we were supposed to enter the cancellation ticket to have our server removed before the billing date (June 22). We were told to post the ticket on July 19.
We did better than that. We posted the ticket shortly after this first chat. On July 19th, we went into servercommand, to find out that the cancellation ticket was no longer there. I rushed into the live chat, and was told that the ticket was lost because we had not posted it in orbit. Ok then, let me post it immediately in orbit then.
Well, unsurprisingly, Orbit was unavailable in that moment. We told the live chat tech, and basically we were left hanging on the chat for hours until we were able again to access the orbit system. the Live Chat person said she could not enter the ticket for us, so we had to wait for orbit to load for us again.
Well, guess what? Orbit loaded again for us, but exactly after the Midnight, so it was now effectively the 20th, no longer the 19th. Nice, uh? Do I smell something fishy here?
So, I went to the chat today, and here is the reply:
Quote:
Please wait while we find an agent to assist you...
You have been connected to Daniel W.
Daniel W: Hello. How can I help you?
Customer: Hello, I need urgent help. It is the third time I am attempting to delete a server, and cancellation is sitll not going through as it should
Daniel W: ok, what is the account id and password? and the reason for cancellation?
Customer: <<snipped>>, H1 outage
Customer: I had sent another ticket more than 1 week agoi
Customer: but it went lost, for some reason
Customer: so I spent two hours a couple of days ago with one of your guys to send this other ticket
Customer: but I see that the cancellation date listed is July
Daniel W: Before I can transfer you to another department, I will need to confirm your account information. Please provide you Orbit/ServerCommand login and the last 4 characters of the password.
Customer: while we wanted an instant cancellation
Customer: <<snipped>> / xxxx
Daniel W has left the session.
Please wait while we find an agent from the Customer Service department to assist you.
You have been connected to Andrew S.
Andrew S: Hi! Thanks for conacting The Planet's Billing Care Team. May I please have your Login I.D. and last 4 characters of your password to Server Command or Orbit please. Please feel free to ask about our promotions
Andrew S: one minute
Andrew S: I am reading you last chaty
Customer: <<snipped>> / xxx
Customer: ah ok
Andrew S: Please give me a few minutes to look into this for you. Thank you.
Customer: thanks
Andrew S: I will have to get my accounting department to review this for you. It has a July date for cancellation because the server cancellation ticket was put in in less than 48 hours from the billing date.
Andrew S: I will have them review this issue for you.
Andrew S: How else may I assit you today ?
Customer: I sent another ticket days before, and it was lost. On July 19 I came to talk about this with one of your techs, and we were unable to access orbit
Customer: They said to wait until orbit was available again for us
Customer: This should all be saved in your logs, I hope
Customer: So, what should I wait for?
Andrew S: I am creating a ticket to the accounting department for them to give you an answer on the cancellation date
Andrew S: ok sir How else may I assist you today ?
Customer: Nothing else, thanks. We will be waiting for the reply.
Andrew S: Thank you for choosing The Planet again my name is Andrew and I hope you have a great day!
Thank you for using InstantService. You may now close this window.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.
Not bad way to answer a customer who has been with theplanet for 7 years! Not only I am NOT bitching about the advertisers I lost because of the outage, since that's our fault, but I must also go through this strange - not to use another word - issue. I spent HOURS this week just to (not) being able to delete this server. I hope the fact of posting this on WebHostingTalk will help us and others in the future.
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Jun 22, 2007
how often does a colo provider's datacenter go down? I'm not talking about resellers or their racks, but the primary provider itself.
This has been the 2nd time (this year I believe) that my datacenter at NAC has suffered a complete power outage [url], their backups failed, and my entire rack of servers were power-cycled.
Luckily I am not a web host but I am running some critical public web services/sites. I have all of the equipment to manage my own colocated machines from afar (monitoring, remote reboot hardware, and KVM/IP hardware for all of my machines) but I'm dead in the water if my datacenter's power is out.
I always ease my pain throughout a network outage or power outage by visiting DSLReports. Their HUGE website is hosted in the same datacenter (probably in the same room) as me and while it is a terrible thing to say, being able to share the downtime with a bigger fish is easier for me to handle.
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May 1, 2008
I was just wondering if anyone else here uses or has used VPS Media?
I have been with them since Monday and running a Counter-Strike server. So far my experience has been positive. My VPS was up and running within minutes of signing up and they were not hesitant to help me prepare it for CS server.
Now I'm thinking about buying another VPS from them for a web server but I cant decide which distro to pick. I'm familiar with CentOS, is Debian or Fedora much different for running a web server?
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Apr 22, 2009
Hopefully this will be a quick and fairly simple question. I already have my site hosted with another provider and very, very happy with the service.
However, i want to add video support to my site. However the current provider i use doesnt have the functionality i need (FFMPeg, etc).
So what i am looking for is a reliable host who will store, convert/encode my files and then stream them for a decent prices. As it will be a new feature to my site im not looking at spending a fortune to start with (i know, how many times have you heard that?) but will be happy to upgrade capacity as and when.
Im not interested in fancy cPanels or bogged down features for "Web Hosting" which i will never use. I just need a host that can store, encode and stream my media (i will handle the scripting side. Ideally they would be located within Europe, but thats not 100% nessesary.
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Feb 26, 2009
Say I use about 1 TB of bandwith / month in media: images, small files, etc. What would be the best hosting option? Most shared hosting I've tried have booted me for using too many resources.
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Jul 28, 2007
moderate single webhosting for audio/video hosting...
may be 1-3gb which moderate cost..
so what should be cost..ideal and which is relaible one...
whats about the free service like youtube...
or paid but not for music ..like rapidshare...
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Mar 18, 2008
I was wondering if anyone could help me out with a Windows Media Relay. For example, if I have two streams with two different companies. Once stream A is filled up then it will forward to stream B. Or even distribute or just randomly to stream A or B.
I have searched and searched, but nothing seems to work.
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Sep 14, 2007
Any one know why media streaming server dont working?
I installed the media streaming server, 1 month ago and it was working well. However, from Thursday to now it dont working. I have checked and the wmv files only run 3seconds is broke.
please tell me what the reasaon make my server doesnt working?
OS: Windows 2003 enterprise R2
Streaming Protocaol : MMS
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Jun 5, 2008
I use Virtuozzo with layeredtech, and since I'm on the move anyway, thought I'd like to try out some different Virtualization products before the migration.
Allot of these products like bare-metal installs though... which is why I'm particularly looking for "virtual media" on the KVM.
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Apr 4, 2009
Don't have much experience with dedicated servers, Just wanted your opinions on this.
Quote:
100Mbit Burstable Unmetered Dedicated Server #1
CPU - Pentium E5200 (dual core)
Memory - 2GB RAM
Hard Disk Space - 300GB HDD
According to the package, it's " 100Mbit Burstable Unmetered Dedicated Server "
I plan on hosting only media, (video files). Are these specs enough to support alot of people downloading?
Also, I've never setup this sort of server before - when I go to click on order now it asks me certain preferances.
Quote:
Raid Controller, OS version, Operating system, Control Panel
There is quite a few options to choose from the drop down menu, I have no idea what they mean.
With dedicated server's is it the same as normal vps? Login, upload, Cpanel etc?
Or is there something else to it?
Just need to host media - nothing special.
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