Media Temple Review

Sign up & Set up

We had been wanting to try Media Temple for a long time because we have heard good things. After visiting the well-designed website, we talked to a representative to go through the set up process. It was pretty quick and painless. We bought the (gs) Grid Server plan and started moving our domains over.

After we signed up the login information was created and Emailed to us. Once logged into their custom control panel we were able to easily edit the DNS (Domain Name System) and get our domain up and going.

Control Panel

Like the rest of the Media Temple website, the control panel is simple and clean. If you’re used to working in cPanel you will enjoy the nice pretty graphics.

Some important facts to note about the Media Temple’s control panel are that you will have access to important areas like File Manager, Database Management, Domain Tools, Cron Jobs and more. Media Temple comes with some additional features that those of us who have used cPanel for a long time really enjoy having.

The GPU Usage Reports show a graph of usage and overusage. If there is a performance tip for a page it will be displayed next to the page that is taking a lot of the GPU. It will suggest making changes to that page to help it perform better.

We thought it was great to see a section for PHP Settings. This section allows you to select which version of PHP should go with each domain. If your website, CMS, or whatever platform you use needs an older version of PHP, this will save you significant time.

We think the control panel is well designed and implemented.

Speed & Reliability

Speed has been relatively fast using Media Temple. We are using a Media Temple as a place for one of our development sites at this time and we have noticed some unusual spikes in slowness from time to time. Besides those times, we have little interruption.

Reliability of Media Temple has been good since we started using them. We are in the middle of researching to see how much the server environment may play a role in our speed issues. We are on a shared server and, according to our Pingdom results, we have had fast response times at other hosts. Any inconsistencies we can report on more fully, we will. At this stage there is no reason blame Media Temple for slow responses.

*** UPDATE 2-3-2012 ***

After a few more weeks using Media Temple, we have come to the conclusion that their Grid Servers (gs) are not as fast as we need them to be. If your site relies on speed we do not recommend Media Temple's Grid Servers. Reasons are as follows.

After doing several tests using Pingdom.com speed test tools and WebPageTest.org we noticed that the main reason our site was having a slow response time was because of the Media Temple servers. What we measured is how long it took from initial connection with the server until we downloaded the first byte of information. On Pingdom tools, this is called the "wait" period and on WebPageTest.org it is called, time to first byte.

Here is a quick overview of what we discovered using WebPageTest.org

At Media Temple -- Time to first byte is 1.729s and our entire load time was 3.656s. This shows that the slow server is half the reason for the slow page load times.

At Site5 -- Time to first byte is .455s and the entire load time is 4.528s. A much faster connection to the server.

At HostGator -- Time to first byte is .524s and the entire load time is 5.598s. Again, much faster and averaging under .7s

Your overall speed can affect the ranking of your site a good bit. We will probably stop using Media Temple because of the slow speed. We would like to keep the server response under .7s.


Support

Using the support system with Media Temple is very easy. Their submit a ticket system is very clean and easy to use. While you are entering a title for the ticket, Knowledge base articles related to what you are typing are generated beneath the ticket. This is really slick and gives you an opportunity to see if there is any articles already covering that subject.

We really like when any company has 24/7 phone support and Media Temple does. To us this says that they are not afraid to work through technical issues with their customers.

*** UPDATE 2-3-2012 ***

We dealt with the tech support through the ticket system in our account about our speed issues and did not receive much helpful information. Our initial contact was polite and helpful, but he first asked us to test our site to see if we had things on our site slowing down the servers.

We did the tests and found, once again, that the main reason for our speed problem was due to their server. After explaining this to him in detail, we were passed off to a new person who explained to us how our CDN was the culprit and, in no way were the Media Temple servers to blame. We were passed around a total of 3 different technicians who all pointed to new tests to try to avoid the real issues.

They sent us a picture of a test that showed their server performing faster than we can get it to go in all our tests. We felt like they were shifting blame and implying we are not tech savvy enough to understand how the server works. Overall, the experience was unhelpful and did not solve any of the issues we were wanting to resolve.