I’ve been an avid Mediatemple customer for about 4 or so years now. In-fact I still remember 4 years ago Mediatemple having the occasional outage issue, but now they have quite a solid offering that has basically no unscheduled downtime. But recently due to wanting more power I made the move to a 512mb managed Linode VPS plan instead of a Mediatemple DV or VE plan, but why?

The grid server plan from Mediatemple is quite good for basic sites but that’s all it is really good for. I hosted about 20 sites on my Grid Server plan, about 3 of those were pretty active blogs with one currently fetching 17,000 unique visitors a month. The Grid Server plan never stopped being a great plan, even though my traffic rose the cheap offering from Mediatemple kept on running without breaking a sweat, in-fact I would be willing to bet running the same amount of sites on Hostgator would have caused some issues.

So, why did I move away from Mediatemple? It’s not that they’re a bad web host, in-fact they’re probably one of the best web hosts I’ve ever had the privilege of being with so much so I recommend them to clients, friends and family. The issue for me was in comparison to other hosts like Linode, Mediatemple are more pricey the added advantage being burst ram when your site exceeds your allocated ram burst ram will provide you with some temporary extra ram to handle the load does somewhat warrant the extra cost, but not by much.

The customer support of Mediatemple is quite good but you wait sometimes a few hours for a response to sometimes an urgent situation, having never really managed a server via SSH before I accidentally messed up my new Linode server after moving all of my sites over. I lodged a support request and got a response in ten minutes, in-between the back and forward my replies were answered no more than 10 – 20 minutes apart, Mediatemple are definitely slower and could learn a lot.

The plan is only $15 per month and you can easily as you go by adding little pieces of ram, extra storage and bandwidth as you go. 90mb of extra ram will set you back an extra $5 per month, Mediatemple offer no such incremental upgrade service, you pay for set amounts of ram, bandwidth and storage with no opportunity to upgrade incremently which works out cheaper if you’re slowly scaling. I do recommend spending the extra $5 per month for the Linode backup service when administering your server via root it’s far too easy to mess up your whole entire server, backups are daily, weekly and the chance to manually take a backup snapshot whenever you want (like before a massive change or install of something).

Notice the speed difference? Because I do.