MediaTemple Down For 2 Days And They Have No Backups Or Ideas
Jan 25, 2009
This is so unimaginably frustrating. I have a website, fightgame.com, with MediaTemple for about 7 months? I don't know how long it's been, but WAY TOO LONG! If they aren't just flat out down, they are constantly having problems. I don't know why I've stayed with them this long, but I guess I've learned my lesson.
For several weeks my stock vbulletin site has sporadically been down due to database access errors. MediaTemple staff is pretty clueless and just couldn't figure it out. After telling them I had no choice but to leave, they agreed to put me on their MySQL container service for free to see if that solves the problems. They didn't tell me when they were going to move my MySQL database, they just did. That's fine, but shortly afterwards all my tables disappeared. Frantically, I opened tickets, called, etc.
It's been 2 days and NOBODY is responding to me whatsoever!!! I would think MediaTemple is out of business or something, what the heck is going on?? No information about what's going on, no plans, no hints as to when they might look into this, absolutely nothing. Well I shouldn't say absolutely nothing. Yesterday I got a response to 1 of my tickets saying they know there's a problem and have escalated the issue for someone to review...
Unfortunately yesterday was a huge day for my site because of the Antonio Margarito vs Shane Mosley megafight. This is when I get all the traffic and new users. But I was down all day long . REALLY unfortunately, my latest backup is somewhat old . I don't have all my recent posts and users... And I have a bad feeling that MediaTemple doesn't take backups of their servers.
So what do I do? I've been involved in the hosting industry in one way or another for many years being a technologist and have never seen such extremely poor service. I don't understand, doesn't MediaTemple host some big sites like TechCrunch?? I guess they don't care at all about their smaller customers. Should I have my lawyer send them a letter or begin a lawsuit to get my data? I would normally assume a hosting company has backups, but MediaTemple is no ordinary hosting company.. If they do have backups, I so desperately want them. FightGame has grown very well and was very exciting for me, without those backups I don't know what's going to happen.
After not hearing from them (aside from escalating the issue for review) for 2 days, I've threatened posting my support tickets on WHT and now have threatened a letter from my lawyer. Do you guys want to see how ridiculous my support tickets are?
This morning, apache crashed on the server that I assist a friend of mine (junglecat here) with. We finally managed to get it up and going - for some odd reason, restarting apache/httpd via Cpanel wouldn't get it going, but SSHing and typing via command line would.
I downloaded the apache error log, and it's CHOCK full of this, repeating over and over (and over) again:
DBD::mysql:t bind_columns failed: Statement has no result columns to bind (perhaps you need to successfully call execute first) at email.pl line 55. DBD::mysql:t fetch failed: fetch() without execute() at email.pl line 56. Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at email.pl line 59. Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at email.pl line 61. Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at email.pl line 76.
Have tried searching and either I'm not using the correct terms, or this doesn't happen that much (I am betting on the former). Any ideas?
What are the best ways to reduce server power consumption?
I have a Dell Poweredge 860 (2.4ghz QC, 5GB RAM, 2 HDs) and it uses 0.46AMPs when running normally. The problem is at boot up it spikes for a few seconds here and there to about 0.6 and this is a real problem as I only have a 0.5AMP allowance.
I guess you can fugure my account expired with servage. but to tell you the truth, I am so P OFF at them
I opened a ticket on my last day and asked if I can move it from 14 months (that I started with) to a 6 months renewal because I could'nt afford to pay the £74 they wanted, and apologised for this. They said I'd have to pay the 74 pounds first and then change my billing to 3 or 6 months.....
I replied saying can I then pay a sum now and a some next week. as I don't have that with me at the moment but wednesday 9th April I wil be able to remew it all
They replied with:
"Hello Ahmed there is 14 days grace period for customers before account gets suspended."
So I thanked them very much, because like that, instead of paying in installments, I can just pay them the whole amount before the grace period was over, otherwise I would've backed up my data and moved it another server, or on my computer till I remew the whole amount....
5 days later (today), I log on to my account, and it has been suspended as I hav'nt paid for 5 days...thats 9 days before the "grace period"
and now all my domains have this dirty suspended page that they have, and I bet I lost half my members and customers like this, as when I see this page on any domain I enter I never go back to it!
I say to my self its my falt, I should've paid when I had to.....but money was tight, and I told them....and they gave me the 14 days, I did'nt ask for anything, but I thought backing up all my sites and my webdriver that I have with them would take me ages, plus the pages have alot of content that would be a hassle, if I have a "14 days grace period".
This is the first time servage have lied to my face, and not by answering a question with yes or no, by saying a feature they have that does'nt exist and but wednesday I bet all my customers and members would've found somewhere else to hang out, as I only contacted them through the mail server on the site and my forum, now I can't even right "we will be back soon....don't go away",
I thought I warn you guys about this grace, if you have an account with them make sure your ready to renew before it expires, and don't believe most of the stuff that they say.
OMG, I used to promote for these people, and tried hard to always say good stuff about them, you see my sig, it was a promotion for them with a coupon code (that I dredfully apologies about to the administration for not reading the rules properly), and I get in return a lie straight in my face with no warning and no way of accessing my database what so ever. Just be warned Guys, don't believe everything they say to you and backup all the time because you never know why they suspend your account.....even if your on thew right track
My shared hosting solution is no longer enough for my needs. I need to move to something better, probably semi ded. I'm looking at mediatemple, then I realized how many sites use it, especially the large ones.
What's so good about it? The lack of cpanel is already discouraging but the prices seem very good. Almost suspect them of overselling...
After almost 6 months of bad experience with our previous web hosting provider, we have decided to move to another one. One of our website's administrators have ended up ordering the ( gs )package from mediatemple which he finds affordable and suitable for our website (500-1000 uniques a day, powered by wordpress & SMF forums) .
Personally, this name (mediatemple) has been buzzing in my head long time ago (yep, they have created a lot of buzz in the internet. great marketers), that's why I didn't reject the idea of choosing them as our hosting provider.
But now, and after searching about them in WHT & google, I've found from your reviews that their gs package is horribly slow, unstable and totally a joke.
Are they really that bad? Have they improved their services since the date of the most bad reviews (few months ago) ? Will the website be damn slow/down again? I'm lost :-)
I want to run couple of sites which are ajax and GWT based. I can spend upto 120 bucks for at least 6 months great service.
So far I have googled, I think I may have to choose between mediatemple or bluehost(unless someone comes out with real and better offer).
I was wondering why I will choose MediaTeple with double the price than other one. What are the advantages do they provide over others?Do they provide exactly what they say? Like 1TB bandwidth, GPU unit usage , 100GB space, fast MySQL ?
I found a lot of people moving from bluehost to mediatemple and vice varsa talking about their issues. But what is the recent performance status of those 2 hosting sites?
My (must to have) requirements are - 1. Is not too much bandwidth sensitive (expected grow in 3 months to consume upto 1TB/month ) 2. Is not too much sensitive on resource usage (must not block users) 3. Is fast in response. (Ajax site) 4. Has fast MySQL server.
Please suggest me best possible web hosting suitable for my requirements.
I am going to begin a social network and for the beginning I just need 100 gb hard disk, 2 ram, 200 TB monthly. I need a web hosting with potential for big traffic and scalability in the near future.
I have read what people from big social networks have said about both companies and they can handle big traffic, though mediatemple has better ranked costumers than the plannet according to Alexa (I checked one by one of their big clients in Alexa.)
My website is going to be about video streaming, webcam streaming and other common things in social networks.
What do you recommend? Do you have a better company in mind that can handle big traffic and scalability?
Im starting a little web business making websites for small business, nothing crazy, simple stuff. I have been poking around and found MT's (gs) service which is cheap, but i heard quality issues. I don't mind geting a dedicated server for 50 for better quality whatever....
Just, have any of you guys had any experience with them or do you know a good host that has cost effective dedicated servers? Media temple seems pretty good for dedicated servers, anyone familiar with it? (with higher amount of domain name acceptance preferred)
I am hosted with Media Temple, but looking to get out from under their slow grid system. I am on their (dv) service but was looking around on Geek Storage's reseller web hosting.
Few Questions:
How is their support response time?
Knowledgeable Support Staff?
Kind friendly service?
Fast Setup?
Things I like that I don't like about MT
GS, utilizes cPanel which I love, plesk I hate, and mt for some reason uses plesk.
i have a mt site and it is being moved. when the dns propogates, how will i be able to access my mt site? i have the ip address and it doesnt load anything. i want an address to give others until the new site is working.
Now that (mt) mediatemple has changed their website, upgraded their packages, and i think that above all that they have anew datacenter located in Virginia.
So now i have a (dv) 3.0 plan from mediatemple, but they are too slow for Europe (im in Portugal), so im looking for anyone that have already experience hosting in the new mediatemple datacenter and if it will be faster to Europe. Details on the new datacenter: [url] Location: Ashburn, Virginia
So any experiences? A
Any more info on the new datacenter?
And from Europe, as already anyone test their speed from their new datacenter?
I've been on shared and reseller hosting for the past five years, its now time to rank up.
I am currently deciding between:
MediaTemple's DV service ($50.00 m/o) EpicVPS (29.99 m/o before promo) Rackspace(?)
I'm not really hung up on the control panel that is used for the server / site admin but I would prefer a cPanel / WHM, although I am flexible with that. I know cPanel takes more RAM... around 200 mb?
I am going to be running my personal website(s), client websites and then hosting a SVN repository for some projects and using Django and Ruby on Rails too. The bulk of the coding will be PHP applications, Wordpress, Wordpress MU, Invision Power Board, VBulletin, Status2K,and Trellis Desk.
I am not really concerned about the bandwidth because none of the sites are really massive traffic, very moderate to light traffic at all. I just like over 20gigs of disk space for projects, media, and storage.
I am on a tight budget and don't want to spend more than $50.00 a month because thats out of my needs, although if its quality I am paying for I don't mind. I would like support via IM or tickets, I never use phone support anyways. I would like a host with a good reputation for support too so anything you can suggest or help me take into consideration please do post!
As for ram enough for Cpanel to run, and the server not to be expensive.
I’ve gone through a few monster threads about these hosts but for people like me who really like to research projects before making an investment in time/money this site is perfect! Most of the articles about these two hosts and their “grid cluster” type services are a bit outdated and so I thought a new thread was in order to give updated feedback and experiences of these platforms.
The deal is I'm based in SE Asia now, and I have clients mainly in BKK & Singapore.
There are lots of fly by night hosts and resold resellers of reseller hosting providers so there's no real consensus, from what I can gather, as to which would be the best most viable option if your anything bigger than a SOHO. Ok, well that could probably be said of the US market as well since these things tend to fluctuate and a great host one month is being shat on the next but there is no market domination in Asia everything's scattered.
In terms of uptime promises I've seen 98%, 99%, 100% and even the infamous 200% or your 4.95 back guarantees, you get my drift, but probably THE hottest names on the market right now if you're a designer or blogger based on my month of research in October-November of 2007 are:
MediaTemple . com & Mosso . com
For reference I'm a web developer so most these offers are designer centric (hosting multiple sites, separate reseller panels, gobs of space, oodles of bandwidth, and ability to handle major spikes in traffic.) Mediatemple even has some spiffy iPhone integration into their CP so you can sched ur chron jobs while getting ur drink on at the local starbucks in ur best apple fanboi attire if one so desires...
At the moment (MT) logos are propagating throughout the blog-o-sphere at an astronomical rate. Almost every trendy designer or blog has either been on, is currently on, or knows someone sister’s uncle’s cousin on Media Temple. I half suspect there are people affixing the (MT) logo just to get in on the cool factor while enjoying the 200% uptime guarantee from 4.95 hosts. But all that aside their offerings are quite impressive for the Grid Server and Dedicated Virtual.
The GridServer concept sounds amazing, exactly what I needed a service to handle the massive influx of visitors my ego imagines I get all the time from DIGG (aka the digg effect) and the ability to host multiple domains with enough space/bandwidth at a reasonable price. So I read the reviews, yes there were growing pains from 2006, a few more in 2007 but people were generally saying things improved as well they should.
So I gave it a shot! I decided to test their GS service out using my resource intensive JOOMLA (mySQL/PHP) a luck-foad of extensions and modules installed to drive up my sql queries, and a server side image processing suite that dynamically scales images for slideshows on demand (slideshowpro). With a 30 day money back guarantee it was worth a test why not.
Now to be fair, I'm in BKK (Thailand) atm so perhaps my results would be different but on the GS running my CMS and image resizing progs (also sql driven) holy crap pictures were taking minutes to resize and send... MINUTES! It was as though every pixel was being pulled from one part of the grid, processed at another, sql query goes to the sql side of the grid and if you jumped twice and pat yourself on the head twice while bouncing a quarter off your foot without letting it drop maybe a picture would come through.
That was pretty disconcerting considering the company that develops my slideshow software is... HOSTED ON (MT), but he's on the (DV) servers I do believe.
Responsiveness of the site was horrendous, and maybe if I was running a very lean mean blog only CMS this would be ok but I have calendaring, site wide translation into 14 languages, Dynamic image processing, Forums, HD videos, my porn collection, and a host of other things my clients don't know about...
Anyway, I'm still testing MediaTemple out and have for the time being bit the bullet and decided to upgrade to the DV line of servers which I've heard good things about for $50/mo that also has a 30 day money backer. Online research shows people who've been having issues with the GS seem to find happiness on the DV servers. I'm still transitioning my databases to this platform but it must be the transpacific journey because it's still seemingly slow! Faster than GS but still 2-4x slower than my bargain basement (Singapore based) shared hosting test servers in every way.
The problem is people who are currently on DV are saying it's not digg-proof, whereas the GS tends to be more so if you can live with the performance although I've been hearing some evidence to the contrary as of late. With regard to the DV solution buckling here's one example of a very popular blogger/designer who was making the jump:
"I’m looking for a better hosting company to host my sites. Do you have any good ones to recommend? This site and Best Web Gallery are hosting at Media Temple, 512mb dedicated-virtual server. Lately, my sites have been down almost every day. I’m getting very frustrated with Media Temple and I want to move out. I’m tired of restarting my server (VPS) everyday. Their tech supports told me that my WordPress sites use too much SQL and CPU resources and I should upgrade to higher hosting plan. But I already upgraded three times since hosting with them: from SS (shared hosting) to GS (Grid-Service), then GS to 256mb DV, and now 512mb DV plan. My site has proved that they can’t handle the Digg Effect.
Recently I got dugg twice and my site was down immediately as soon it made popular to Digg front page. So, I don’t think upgrading will make any difference. I think it is time to move and find a better host." via ndesign-studio . com
Well that just won't do, clients of my caliber like asiandogwhistles . com are constantly under bombardment from sites like Digg and Fark. So to hear this from a 3rd generation (MT)er doesn't look good and I'm over in Asia so add another 150 ping on a good day but if a whale farts near the optical cable in the pacific it can spike to +250 ping. My whale ping theory is currently being circulated in various academic circles if you must know…
That brings us to now, and right now we are trying to figure out how viable Mosso's solution could be but most of the posts here are from last year. I have written this essay in hopes of being able to get UP-TO-DATE reviews of the Mosso system from users who have spent some time on it. If you are in my boat, your situation will be similar to this:
1. looking to step up from Shared Hosting 2. looking for reliability to handle digg/fark/slashdot 3. looking for a service that just works with little management 4. Ability to add multiple sites with custom user panels 5. Ability to focus on more web development and less on server management
So while I know I'm merely postponing the inevitable move to dedicated right now I'd like to just do what it is I do best, writing long articles... but after that is web development. I've heard great things about rackspace of course, and while Mosso is using their systems to a degree they have a fully customized their "hosting system" similar to (MT)'s grid concept so it’s not exactly Rackspace.
The question is where do they stand now? Is anyone running production sites on there?
Or better yet is there anyone outside of the US running their sites on there or is that just not a viable option anymore? I’ve done enough searching to understand Mosso’s clustered solution is supposedly better than (MT)’s but is it production stable at this point?
I don't mind giving up ping and throughput slightly if the reliability and service is higher so let's hear it!
I've been hearing alot of good things about MediaTemple hosting recently. They seem very cutting edge (in terms of hosting) and they seem to offer good prices too.
Has anyone here been using them for a while? What is they're down times like? Would it be possible for me to move my client sites (from UnitedHosting) to them and give all my clients the same features - the webmail, the stats? ...
Does anyone out there have experience of securing a MediaTemple VPS? One of my clients seems to have his heart set upon one of their virtual servers but I have my doubts about the usefulness of a software firewall (iptables), running on the same machine with 256MB of RAM.
After weeks of research on WHT i am still undecided who to choose for my next webhost.
I have narrowed it down to three:
- MediaLayer - 1gb/20gb/6 domains at $19.95 - LiquidWeb - 1.5gb/100gb/3 dmoains at $19.95 - MediaTemple - 100gb/1TB/100 domains at $20
Which one would you recommend and why ?
Also does MediaTemple grid service offer any advanctages over the other two.
My requirement is that i want my website to run very fast and server to have very good uptime. I am currently on HostGator & using over 10gb of monthly transfer. I am getting oround 5000 hits but hope to increase it around 10,000 with a new wordpress blog. They reason to move from HostGator is that any MySQL/PHP based apps run extremely slow.
Is anyone else out there hosting IMAP email with MediaTemple? I am trying to transfer IMAP accounts to MediaTemple after switching from an email only provider, MailSnare. I use Mac Mail as my email client and am having trouble getting my accounts set up properly. It seems to have to do with my path to IMAP.
I've tried everything including:
(blank) /mail mail/ mail INBOX. INBOX
Different techs at mediatemple told me to use /mail and INBOX. but neither work properly. For the most part, I have been able to see my mail, but not my folders, or not all of my folders, or I've gotten repeated warnings that IMAP command "SELECT" failed. In one of my accounts now I can't see the mail at all, but the account is telling me there is 1 unread message. My problem seems to have been complicated by all the messing around with the preferences trying to fix things. If it makes any difference, the email address for the account is the same as it was with my previous host. I wonder if that's causing a problem when trying to access the mail in Library/Mail?
I purchased a shared hosting with these guys. I transfer domain / Set up email accounts, ect. Everything is working flawlessly.
So, yesterday my boss was riding my ass because he said he couldn’t send email. I went over to his house, and he was right it wouldn’t send (his client is entourage). I verifier’s smtp settings, and it just wouldn’t send. I found the problem to be his SBC.
Of course he doesn’t believe that (still thinks the mailserver is the issue).
So to draw this to a close. is there any way to verify that an email is being sent.. such as a receipt that the 'message has been sent'? He's using entourage on the mac.
Also, what is you're normal procedure to troubleshoot smtp/pop issues?
i shoud be asking this question to mediatemple themselves but i cant seem to find any contact details, so ...
the mediatemple DV plan comes with 30 plesk licenses. i was wondering if its possible to manage several domains in one plesk control panel / account, or is it strictly limited to one domain per plesk license? its basically for a bunch of domains i manage myself and id like to be able to manage them all with one login account.
possible?
anyone know the actual price for additional plesk licenses? their KB mentions "competitive prices" but nothing more.
I am currently using V7 hosting and am looking at changing to mediatemple. Any one have any thoughts on mediatemple? Also any other recommendations would be great. I am currently paying $29 month but don't want to pay more than $20
