Am trying to choose a shared host. Either RackSpace Cloud Sites ($100 a month) or MediaTemple ($20 a month) or MediaLayer ($19 a month).
I was really inclined to MediaTemple but I read some real bad review about it. Am wondering what has your experience been with any of the above. In Cloud Sites, do the 10000 CPU cycles get over quickly?
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.
I am working on a mission critical project and wanted to get your feedback on the following two choices. Reliability, Up-time, Support are key items. If money can pay for a better nights sleep then its well worth it IMHO. Well here are the specs from Rackspace and Mediatemple attached below. Looking to deploy this project asap. Any help always appreciated..
View 14 Replies View RelatedI am considering a move from Pair Networks to Rackspace. When I talked to the folks at Rackspace, the guy thought I was a good fit for their Cloud Sites product.
I have several Wordpress blogs, the busiest one doing around 15,000 views daily. I also have 3 vBulletin forums, once which is pretty busy and doing around 400,000 views per month. I also run a few member sites, blog powered and using Amember Pro.
I'm wondering if this is just too much to throw on the Cloud. I've heard that disk I/O is a little slower on the Cloud, and vBulletin is pretty intensive on the database.
Another option I heard is to get a dedicated server with Rackspace, host the databases and anything else I want on that server, but put the code base for the busiest sites into the Cloud in order to take advantage of the load balancing.
Any feedback?
Pair Networks has been great, but I started looking around yesterday because they were having a hard time making one of my servers cope right with the busy blog. Server load through the roof and I was frustrated. I have a feeling I'm overpaying Pair for servers which may be a little dated here. Hence, my lookint into Rackspace.
So, feedback on the Cloud or Cloud w/ Dedicated? Any other pretty busy forums/blogs you know of running in Rackspace Cloud Sites?
I wanted to share my experience with Rackspace Cloud, till now their support and service are a+, the control panel used to be slow but not it's fixed, the only problem i faced till now was with their control panel file managed but it's not that important as you can use ftp instead, i have cloud sites account with them to host my site Rapid Zone and i strongly recommend them.
View 14 Replies View RelatedWhat do you guys think about Cloud Servers by Rackspace?
They said its kind of like a VPS but more powerful.
I am now with Rackspace's new cloud servers. I understand that they are still under a "beta testing" but I decided to give it a go.
Over all I like it. There are however some annoying parts which I will list first.
1. DNS manager issues... I have many DNS records for my domain and it seems that the DNS manager isn't so forgiving. It gives you the ability (or you think so) to delete an individual record however I have never been able to do that. It would always return with an error which is quite annoying. So I moved my DNS servers to another location and have been happy since.
2. Chat support is too much like dell tech support. The first person you get doesn't really know what he is talking about (I have been talking with them a few times about the above mentioned DNS issues and they confirmed multiple bugs within the system but this was at level 2 support and it was quite annoying having to explain the problem to everyone that I spoke too) What I ended up doing is going with Slicehosts chat room where I always found a very helpful hand (they are the same company so it's not stealing). They helped me with many of my issues.
3. The documents/wiki is very hard to find. If I didn't get a link to it from a tech support guy then I wouldn't of known it was there. All it is, is a wiki formatted silcehosts article repo. But it is quite helpful. My tip is to make it more visible.
Overall I am happy with the speed and stability of the server. So thanks Slicehost/Rackspace for your service.
who here has experience? Is it phenomenal or awful?
View 14 Replies View RelatedI'm currently running two classified ad sites with a php script and a mysql database. Both just launched, but I expect them to have decent traffic within 1 year.
Here are the two options I'm currently considering:
1. a fully managed dedicated server such as Wiredtree provides. This will roughly cost me between $250 and $350/month.
2. go with Rackspace Cloud. Take advantage of their $100/month and then just pay as you go as traffic increases.
It's a hard decision.
The title basically says/asks it all. I believe Mosso initially had no Rackspace affiliation other than using Rackspace's services, and then subsequently became a subsidiary of Rackspace. Now, over the past few days, Mosso has become The Rackspace Cloud.
Given Rackspace's reputation, I have to believe this is good news, but I figured I'd toss it out there for the pros to discuss.
I've thought about taking the plunge to Mosso/Rackspace Cloud but haven't pulled the trigger yet. I wouldn't use anywhere close to the full $100 package at the start but I'd probably grow into it within 6-12 months, as my sites get back online and grow. Thus, I'm kind of facing the old chicken-and-egg conundrum: I don't want to pay $100 for $10 worth of usage, but at the same time, moving sites -- and especially IMAP email accounts -- is such a pain in the rear end, I don't want to keep moving every time my sites/traffic grows.
I wish these guys had a $25 or $50 starter plan from which users could upgrade. I'd be all over that. (I know about their lower-cost Cloud Server packages (or whatever it's called), but I'm not tech-savvy enough for unsupported hosting.)
I am very interest about RackSpace Cloud site technology
http://www.mosso.com/cloud.jsp
Does any one over here using RackSpace Cloud Site
I have couple of sites hosted on a one virtual dedicated server, I get total about 100K+ hits per month. About 70GB bandwidth usage per month. Is cloud site technology is a good choice for me?
I have been with Medialayer for the last year, using their application hosting, and so far the experience has been quite good. They helped me transfer my sites over, and have answered pretty much all of my tech support questions within half an hour. However, I'm reaching my limit as far as their application hosting goes, and I'm not sure if I can afford the next jump.
My current deal is around 35 dollars a month for 50 gb transfer and 2500 mb of space. I've been playing with my setup for the last month or two trying to keep it under those limits, but now that I'm looking to launch a new site, I don't think I can do that anymore. They have offered another option for me, which would seem to be a VPS type solution.
Application Intensive (A.I.)
15,360MB SAS RAID Protected Storage
200GB Premium Data Transfer
768MB Dedicated RAM
DirectAdmin Reseller Access (create as many accounts/domains as you wish)
LiteSpeed Web Server (Enterprise)
Use of our Redundant DNS cluster and anonymous nameservers
R1Soft Continuous Data Protection
Full Management, 24x7x365 proactive monitoring
$129.95/mo, free setup. (month-to-month commitment)
Signup URL: https://clients.medialayer.com/signup-ai.php
Add-ons:
[+] 100GB Additional Data Transfer: $25/mo
[+] Additional IP addresses with justification: $1/mo per IP (first additional IP is free with justification)
Each virtual environment is given additional space so that you can safely use all of the 15GB within your reseller account.
Each host machine (the system housing all of the virtual environments) is based on the following hardware:
Dell PowerEdge 2900
Dual Quad Core Xeon 5420 (total of 8 cores at 2.5GHz each!)
16GB FB-DIMM RAM
8x 73GB SAS 2.5'' Drives
PERC 6i RAID 10
1000mbps uplink
Located in New York, NY.
However, 130 bucks a month is a pretty big jump up from what I have now, and is quite a lot when compared to most of the VPS solutions being offered here. I'm also slightly concerned about the NY server location. My current sites are based in China, and have had some long load times using their LA servers, and I'm concerned that that would just be exacerbated by having a NY server locale.
So, should I be looking to stay with them or move on? If I move on, are there other good hosts one could recommend that would be able to provide similar levels of support?
I've read several good reviews on MediaLayer and am in the market for a 10 dollar or less a month host with room to upgrade.
I took a quick look at their website and they don't advertise insane stats for 2 dollars a month, so I assume you actually get what you pay for with them, is that the case?
Essentially, I'm looking for some examples of WHY Medialayer is a top quality host. I'd love to hear some stories and/or references, if anyone here has them.
Also since im making this new thread I will write a review so far on what ive experienced with medialayer.
1. My account was setup within 1 hour of purchase
2. I received a professional and very detailed email regarding all the services
I had access to, which I might add was very user friendly.
3. The DirectAdmin Layout is very clean looking and modified to fit their websites
theme. Everything works perfect.
4. And 4th the most important of all.. I did a dns check on my domain after 2 days of letting the NS propogate and checked intodns.com and several other dns places and their dns is setup perfect.. there is literally no error at all which is very rare. ussually intodns.com will show an error on most dns's. My site is noteably extremely more responsive then it was on my prior host and they even allow ssh access so I was easily able to transfer my large sql db file over in a few seconds.
Overall this host is very good from what ive experienced in 2 days. Now I realize its only been 2 days but from what ive experienced on the process of setting everthing up and the site running, for 2 days I can tell its an excellent host of choice. Their email support is also extremely fast. Ive had a question regarding my mx records for mail and was responded within 2hrs or less with a very detailed explaination of the question I asked.
Please guide me which web host to be choose. I am planning to host a jewelry online store with 500 products. I am looking for shared hosting in starting. Web space required would be around 100 Mb.
How much bandwidth you think in starting it will be required?
Which web host is better and why? Also tell me considering features wise too. If any other good web host for starting then tell me.
I am in the process of building a database-driven website. The main purpose of the site is really for me to improve my PHP and MySQL, but I will be writing a forum and offer blogs to users, as well as the main point of the site, which is to allow users to upload text-based artwork (ie. stories, poems, etc). I don't expect the site to use up that much bandwidth (assuming my code is clean) or space, as I don't expect it to grow that large. Like I said, it's mainly a learning exercise.
Anyway, the point is, I am looking for a host. I am currently with DreamHost but am having a lot of trouble creating a custom php.ini (because I know absolutely no PERL and am just starting to learn shell commands). The main host I'm considering is MediaLayer. They advertise on their website that you have a private cgi-bin directory, but it was unclear whether this directory would have a private php.ini. This is pretty important for me as I don't have the skills (yet) to do anything too clever like what is required at DreamHost to change it.
Is anyone here a current or former MediaLayer customer? Is the php.ini in the cgi-bin? I know that DownTownHost have private cgi-bins, but the php-ini is not there.
I had a look on the forums but, although I found mostly good general feedback about MediaLayer, I couldn't find anything that specifically addressed the creation of a custom php.ini file.
i have a question about overselling, if i offer 999999gb's of diskspace for $1/mo, you say i am overselling, and its a bad thing, right? well does that mean medialayer oversells because they can't truly offer unlimited mysql databases, can they? eventually, just creating databases thousands of times will consume diskspace?
View 14 Replies View RelatedI am torn between Cartika and MediaLayer. I am looking to have 2 sites hosted with them. I am at the moment only considering these two options. I am looking for reliability, speed, and true multihosting along with CDP back ups. The third contender was UnitedHosting, but they are a smidge more expensive. I will be hosting one Joomla site and one Wordpress site. Price wise they are on par. Both their reps seem outstanding. I need a nudge one way or the other.
View 14 Replies View RelatedI work for a medium sized non-profit organization. We are currently looking to upgrading our hosting. These are our requirements:
- 2 gigs of storage
- 15-20 gigs of bandwidth
- PHP/MySQL
- SSH access
- As fast and reliable as possible
Our budget is up to $30/month, but I'd like to pay a little less if possible. Most importantly, we need the hosting to be fast and reliable. Our website is built with PHP/MySQL, and right now it takes forever to load anything. It seems that Medialayer and Liquidweb keep coming up as reliable and fast hosts, so I'd like to hear your thoughts as to which you think would fit our organization best.
I moved from A Small Orange to Medialayer in late June of 2008, and although I was a little unsure on going from cPanel to DirectAdmin, aside from one small thing* I honestly don't miss cPanel at all. Medialayer themselves ported my sites over (I'm always scared I'll mess things up on my own) so really, changing control panels was rather painless for me.
Anyway, as far as actual hosting I could not be happier. The only downtime I've experienced was scheduled and announced well in advance and never for very long.
Support tickets and general inquires are answered ridiculously fast to the point of being scary. I'm still not used to getting replies within minutes instead of hours or days.
I don't currently use a custom plan but the fact that I can request one is a huge plus to me. With my previous host you could add extra bandwidth but not space (you're only option was to simply go up to the next plan) and that always felt very limiting to me.
I'm aware that these days hosts with Medialayer's pricing structure are called "expensive" by some, but I'm still stuck in 2004 and consider them priced just right for what they offer. Also, as far as I'm aware Paypal is still the only payment option, and although that is fine for me, it won't be for others.
* (The only thing I miss is the ability to purge/make unwrittable the stats/awstats folders. I'm not sure if this is a host vs host or cPanel vs DirectAdmin difference, and really it is so minor in the grand scheme of things and only even noticeable to someone stupidly anal such as me.
i wanted to share my hosting review with medialayer.com
i have been with medialayer since 10 months.
my site visitors are mostly from istanbul,Turkey and europe ,even there is a long distance i get efficient response times.
support times are excellent,although there is a time zone difference,i get instant help during my working hours.
i recommend every one who needs a reliable and fast hosting.
in case you need to check my site with medialayer here is the link.
it has been a while since I last visited WHT. So hello all! Work is slow today and I'm procrastinating.
I was with MediaLayer for a good amount of time. I used the service mostly to host a personal site and develop some APIs using Truveo video search engine and Zend platform on Facebook. The source codes of these projects were synchronized and managed by a group of developers through SVN+SSH tunneling.
I have absolutely nothing negative to discuss about MediaLayer. They have been great every step of the way. Granted, they're not exactly the cheapest option among what were presented to me at the time, but I'm glad I picked them. After all, $10 didn't break the bank, and I simply didn't need 500GB of bandwidth (are they in the scales of TB these days?). The servers were well managed, and multiple DNS servers are always a plus (well at least save me a trip to DynDNS). They used LiteSpeed, which is an excellent choice, also considering their web server environment is very much similar to my developmental machine at home. Oh yeah, they don't use Cpanel. =) Haha.. I've never liked Cpanel. Too clutter.
I didn't observe any downtime while I was with them. None of the developers involved in the projects had issues with the SVN server. I don't have any statistics to prove it, so you just have to take my words for it. =) MySQL access is reasonably fast.
Customer service was great. All emails were answered professionally within 24 hours, including weekends. Phone representatives ware extremely helpful when I called. I remember once when my identity was stolen, the CSR I spoke to on the phone were very reasonable and handled the billing issues to my satisfaction.
So I'd highly recommend to MediaLayer!
I'll keep it short and sweet. I signed up for medialayer on December 23, 2007. Its been more than 6 months and there has been not one unscheduled downtime, the support is phenomenal on the rare occasion I need to use it and its the fastest host I've ever used, dedicated or shared. My sites have been on the front page of Digg, Osnews, Stumbleupon and I've yet to see my hosting so much as shudder. Unbelievably powerful servers. They are accommodating, friendly and brilliant.
No, they don't have terabytes of bandwidth and it doesn't cost $1 per month; but it doesn't get much better than this otherwise.
Hosted sites ticketed to mod team. Keep up the great work, Medialayer.
Currently I am hosting with MediaLayer and I am very happy with their service. I have been with them for over a year now. Their uptime and speed is amazing. Support is fast, knowledgeable and all round pleasant to work with. I have no problems with them except for one. Their packages are pricey for what you get ($10/month for 500MB Storage, 10GB Transfer, 3 domains ). It is coming time for me to upgrade my package but I do not want to pay the fortune they are asking for a paltry amount of extra resources.
So my question is, what other hosting companies are there out there who can offer me the same excellent services that MediaLayer does but with more resource bang for my buck?
Been using ML for 2-3 days now.
vBulletin's performance is a hell of a lot better compared to my last host (fasthosts.co.uk - which takes 60 seconds to give an error page!)
In addition, litespeed is pretty damn sweet.
Setup took maybe 10-25 minutes from payment.
Only problem I have with it is that SSH is a bit too locked down - wget/etc don't work, and sort of negate the need for me to use SSH in the first place.. (to get and unzip files without having to upload massive things)
I have a fairly important php bug tracking system on medialayer.
The service has never been down in 6 months and the speed is excellent.
I imagine customer support is just as good, but thankfully i've never needed to try
It's much faster, more flexible (no hard written resource limits) and more reliable than most hosts i've used (site5, hostingzoom, resellerzoom to name a few).
I couldn't ask for a better service.
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...
I want to host my own domains/resell hosting space, but not so sure what I should use.
Should I use Mediatemple's (mediatemple.net) Gridserver service, or a VPS service?
What do you think:
I can't really afford a cPanel subscription on top of the VPS's feeds.
What VPS system do you think is good on CentOS?
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 signed up with MediaLayer [url](ML) for my client in November last year.
I've read a lot about ML here which are mostly (all?) good +ve reviews & so I decided to pick them to host my client's site.
Since the website is an ecommerce site based on Magento, I needed something that could handle application load. Its for this reason I chose ML.
Magento itself is pretty slow the first time until cache starts working.
So far its been smooth at ML and this post is just to add to the pool of its +ve reviews on WHT.
There was just one unexpected downtime which lasted for a few minutes. It was the mysql server that was down, not the http server (litespeed).
You dont get a whole lot of space at ML, so hosting a lot of raw data like images can be pricey - most of the space taken on my client's site are product images - and duplicated in cache for every dimension by Magento. As of now it gets 500-1000 pageviews a day but this is to increase over 10 times this year and if it goes beyond shared hosting limits (which I doubt), we'll move it to ML's VPS.
I am so overwhelmed by the quality of hosting provided by Medialayer, that I decided to review them after being almost 2 years on their servers. My "bread and butter" website is hosted on their server and all I experienced in these 2 years was sheer quality, stability and prompt customer support (very rarely required).
It is a saying that you get what you pay for, and it shows. Medialayer is not one of those hosts with "unlimited everything" plans for $3 a month. I am on their starter shared plan which is $9.95 a month with 500 mb of space and 10Gb bandwidth. Some may find that costly, but believe me, it is worth every cent.
Uptime: Excellent. I have never seen my website down or someone complaining about it. No downtime experienced whatsoever till now.
Speed: Rocket fast. Scripts execute rocket fast too.
Ease of use: Excellent. They provide direct admin (instead of cpanel) and never faced any problem with that either.
Customer support: Blink of an eye, round the clock. I am from the opposite part of the world (GMT +5.5) and at 11 AM my time, I get instant response to a support ticket if opened. Secondly, they go above and beyond, - I had a problem with one of my php scripts and these guys studied the script and pointed out the flaw (which might have been harmful) if not rectified.
I will be more than happy to let anyone know my website, mods please let me know how do I prove the authenticity of the review, with my website. These guys deserve a lot more than just a review.
Conclusion: The best host so far I have got. In these aspect I must tell you, I have 3 more hosting service providers, Medialayer smokes them apart. And my personal thanks to Gurpreet Virdi via this forum for running such a tight ship consistently. I believe, the success of a website business depends on the hosting heavily, so Medialayer folks - it has been my pleasure to stay with you all these time and thank you for everything.