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Hell on GRID.Cluster.1

Life • Web Design • December 5th, 2006

—Why are you making that culo face?
—[silence]
—What’s wrong??? Are you mad at me? Have I done something wrong???
—My server is down again. I can’t work
—Again?… Seems like you need to change hosting companies…
—I can’t. Media Temple is supposed to be THE BEST
—Oh
—Yeah [back to culo face]

What are you supposed to do when you are already hosted with the best company, and such company keeps making you eat dog crap?

I used to be a very satisfied Media Temple customer…
Except for the eternal inability to access Urchin site reports on my Mac without the application crashing my browser, and the occasional email glitch, I rarely had any complaints about my hosting service. That is, until they decided to come up with a new glorious product: .

They told us that this updated product was THE SHIT and would solve all of our troubles.

They told all Shared-Server customers that if we had the guts, we should try to migrate ourselves at our own pace, because eventually (and very soon) they would start running automatic migrations to Grid-Server. So I decided to suck it up and migrate myself; so that if anything broke I would be there to fix it immediately. And the migration did break something: something as important as my full work portfolio, but that was my fault and I was able to fix it. I was glad that I did my own migration and now I could enjoy the fabulous features of Grid-Server in peace.

Or so I thought.

Since I migrated and was put on crappy GRID.Cluster.1 both of my sites have become old wounded turtles: Pages take a lot longer to load than they did before, and the worst: For the last weeks everything has gone to hell!

Several times a day:

  • FTP won’t work
  • Email will go down
  • Web domains won’t resolve (mqstudio.com is not found… mafemaria.com is not found)
  • If domains resolve, whenever I request any of my pages I’ll have to wait an average of 10 seconds staring at the current page before the server bothers to retrieve the requested page and begin loading it. Multiplying by the approximate amount of page requests I can make on a work day, we’re talking about 1-2 hours of useless wait time a day (I’m not including the time to actually load the pages once they are retrieved).
  • And site logs for several days are missing. Since (mt) site reports have never worked for me, all I can ask for is to get my beloved site logs. Alas, no site logs now.

I keep opening support tickets, and they keep notifying me of how “Engineers have been able to solve the issue, and everything should work now”. But it doesn’t. Every day for the last weeks I’m experiencing the same problems. And you know what? I need this to be fixed.. Not only because it probably bothers users visiting my sites who may just leave thinking that I’m an idiot with a broken site, but because I have all of my work hosted in broken Cluster.1. and if the server doesn’t work I can’t work, and I can’t bill, and I don’t make a living.

Media Temple’s 2-month credit for the recent trouble doesn’t even begin to cover the actual cost I’m incurring for being hosted on such a buggy platform.

If this post is able to publish, it will be a miracle.

Posted: Tue, December 5th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Filed under: English, Web Design, My Sites, Life, Aargghhh!
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8 comments:

  1. On December 5th, 2006 at 3:56 pm, Jennifer wrote:

    I think “the best” is often relative to your own experience. Are you hosting with them because they’re local? The place I host with is in Arizona - definitely not close to Dallas. Though I am not as high-level of a customer as you are, I have had no issues with them as yet.

    So, back to “the best”. Why are they the best? Even the “best” fail eventually, at *some*thing.

  2. On December 5th, 2006 at 4:13 pm, Maria wrote:

    Media Temple claims that: The world’s hottest, most talented designers have trusted (mt) for years to serve their digital creations. Being the most critical demographic on the Internet, we believe this has strong merit.

    They do host a lot of important people in the industry, which made me consider them as soon as my previous host stopped being adequate for my needs. Their package includes a very complete set of features, allowing webmasters a lot of geeky freedom at a very affordable price, and they adopt new features probably quicker than other hosting companies.

    However, I would say that their biggest strength is the customer service. As pissed off as I am by the global bugs of their newly released product, they are very responsive to support requests, and in other cases where I’ve needed individual help, they’ve been stellar.

    But you’re right: Not everybody remains great forever. If somebody knows of a better service, please let me know. For now, looking at where the big people host their babies I only see (mt) and Dreamhost.. But I’ve heard worst things about the latter.

  3. On December 5th, 2006 at 7:25 pm, Kim Rodriguez wrote:

    sounds almost frustrating enough to quit and go on maternity leave! Argh!! hehe ;-P

  4. On December 5th, 2006 at 7:30 pm, Maria wrote:

    Almost. HA! HA! HA!

  5. On December 5th, 2006 at 7:38 pm, Danny wrote:

    I don’t know what your price range or requirements are, but I’ve heard good things about APIS - http://apisnetworks.com/packages.php

    I use Dreamhost (as you know now I think), but I don’t count on it being very reliable, just very cheap and “reliable enough” :) And honestly, that’s their target market. Non-mission-critical stuff.

  6. On December 5th, 2006 at 11:01 pm, shorty114 wrote:

    I’m on the (gs) plan too, and I’ve been seeing a noticeable amount of quirkiness. A lot of the time, the database goes down or isn’t responding and I’m greeted by the lovely WordPress database error page. I mean, I know it’s a new service and all, and the bugs need to be ironed out, but this is a little too much for the hosting company that’s supposed to be the best. I never had these problems with A Small Orange… :\

  7. On December 6th, 2006 at 7:35 am, mandarine wrote:

    I would personally stick with them. I have had the same kind of annoyances this summer with my hosting service (on a much more benign scale), with my mandarine site randomly broken. As I was moving into a new home, I had all freedom to break the membership at no extra cost. Yet I stayed and waited and complained, and it finally paid off.

    My belief is that today’s economic world would be nicer if there was more fidelity in commercial relationships. You have a totally different perspective when you feel you can reasonably rely on your customers to stick with you through your ups and downs. Nobody has to be the best all the time — certainly not I. Why would I expect that from others?

    Innovation often requires a lot from commercial partners. I bet everybody has forgotten how difficult (difficult as in near-bankruptcy) the Boeing 747 entry into service had been. Engine problems, delays, grounded aircraft, inadapted airports. Had there not been customers who sucked it up, this flagship of the XXth century would have been stillborn.

    OK probably migrating to a new server is less difficult than building the largest aircraft in the world, so you are entitled to expect a smoother ride — bottomline, I’d write down (for myself) some kind of ultimatum with a measurable, verifiable criterion, so that I do not change minds every day about what to do. And I’d let them know I’m pissed.

  8. On December 6th, 2006 at 7:51 am, Maria wrote:

    The good news is that they definitely can’t afford to keep these bugs unfixed: I am not the only one screaming about these issues. It’s the whole “cluster”, and the collective whining began a long time ago.

    They are indeed innovating. The theory behind this product is actually pretty good. I just hate that I gave myself as guinea pig for this first release — but I had no choice.

    Your perspective reminds me of a short story I have long wanted to share… Maybe this afternoon, after work.

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