Site5 vs Media Temple, 1 month later

site5

Update Nov 2016: I no longer recommend Site5; see: The Sinking of Site5

Last month I made the switch to Site5, away from Media Temple. The reason for doing so was because of terrible response times on Media Temple. This post is a quick follow up to share my experience of the first month on Site5.

First of all, response times have improved tremendously. The difference is like night and day. My average response time is now 750ms, down from 2,946ms in January.

Guess when I switched over to Site5?

Because migrating sites are a pain, I’m not really in a hurry since I still have months left on my Media Temple hosting plan. This means that some of my sites including buzzmedia.com.my are still on Media Temple. Bad decision. In February alone, there were at least 3 outages to the cluster that hosts my website:

  1. #1828 – (gs) Grid-Service Cluster.04 Unavailable
  2. #1849 – High Load on (gs) Grid-Service Cluster.04
  3. #1867 – Intermittent latency on (gs) Grid-Service Cluster.04

The last one is still ongoing and as I’m typing this blog post, here’s what I see on buzzmedia.com.my:

Status as of 6pm on 28 Feb 2011

This is extremely, extremely frustrating since I can’t access my email as well. Needless to say, uptime for this month on Media Temple has been up and down like a yoyo.

I don’t know where Media Temple went wrong, but I’ve gone from being a fan to someone who can’t wait to get all my sites off. If you’ve found this blog post via Google, I hope that I’ll save you some headaches and heartaches by recommending that you forget about Media Temple and come join me at Site5 instead.

Note: For my monitoring methodology, I set the URL of my check to the WordPress login pages for theclickstarter.com (Site5) and buzzmedia.com.my (still on Media Temple). Since both checks are for the same page, the page weight should have been almost exactly the same.

Check out Site5 hosting plans and pricing.


6 Comments on "Site5 vs Media Temple, 1 month later"

  • jools says

    Thanks for the info. As you say above, I found your site via google and was researching the reliability of MediaTemple. I quite amazed at all the really bad things I’ve read about MediaTemple all over the web.

    I’m under the impression now that MediaTemple has become the basket-case of the hosting world. Lots of really angry people going back several years, right up to the current day in March 2011.

    Now I know! Thanks.

  • Bart says

    I have to agree with your experiences, I’ve been on MT grid service for a few years, after last years hacking (which I don’t blame on MT), the service never seemed to recover…database wouldn’t load WordPress, which I run about 12 sites using.

    I finally had to give up and moved to Site5 as well, and although I hate their user interface, everything works. I still have about 70% of my active sites on MT, but have begun picking up the pace to move them since mySQL is out of date (support ended in 2009?) and now they HAVE to update it for the 3.2 WordPress release. I just think MT outgrew the grid service, I hear only good remarks about the other hosted solutions.

    The only hard part is that their user interface is outstanding, I always hesitate on each website migration because I’ll miss the MT interface when I’m done.

    • blogjunkie says

      Site5’s user interface isn’t that bad. Their SiteAdmin 2.0 is much more modern looking than the previous one too. But in the end, the UI of the control panels don’t really matter much – uptime and speed is what matters

  • David says

    David, I’d agree that MT has really gone down the tubes. I was one of the first people to end up on The Grid. I have a site on Cluster 1. In the beginning it was awesome. Unfortunately the Grid couldn’t keep up with the scale like they anticipated. I too have moved to Site5. However, I have a couple client sites on Site5 shared hosting and it is faster, but it’s not awesome. I had one clent’s site experience 24hours of continuous downtime. That said I have about 4 VPS servers at Site5 and couldn’t be happier! They’re fast, reliable and support is great!

  • pau1oreis says

    Hello David!

    After a few years, you’re still on Site5?
    What is your opinion about them?
    And on Media Temple, not coming back?

    • I outgrew Site5’s shared hosting and am on managed WordPress hosting now. However I still have a reseller account on Site5 and recommend all my clients to Site5 with great results. Haven’t had the opportunity to try Media Temple again. Hope they’ve fixed things..

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