George Pearce - iamPearce

A couple of days ago, on impulse, I picked up a hosting package from ThisWebHost, just to have a play around with. I did so on the advice of a friend, Donald Kelly, because while their virtually unheard of, he thinks the world of them. My hosting time with GoDaddy is coming to an end (after a month and a half, and I’ll post to explain why soon), somewhere new was needed.

I was attracted by the fact that they don’t oversell, they don’t pretend to be anything their not, and on Donald’s word, their servers really are monsters.

So far, I’m pretty impressed (although, I was the same with GoDaddy. Then it slowed down to a halt), the support was quick and they even offered to move my sites, although I’m still only playing with two other domains on there at the moment.

The other attractive thing about this*, is the lack of negative reviews. I can’t find one. For a company that’s been in business two years, that isn’t bad at all.

My great plan, is that I have a months hosting with them- normally after a month I know whether I like a host or not, and if I do like them, then I’ll move a couple more domains and shut down my GoDaddy account, stick with This* for the time being. With my exams coming up, I can see that happening.

Yesterday, after over a year with them, I closed my MediaTemple account. I’m now hosted on much cheaper European servers for the time being – and this is why I decided to move away from MT.

- Speed. Over the last six months, I’ve found that speeds for anything other than standard HTML/Image files have decreased massively, and the load times for my (dynamic) blog have increased beyond what I’m happy with. I know I could have used caching and I will be on this host, but I didn’t expect to need to.

- Support. The MediaTemple support is *amazing*. I would still recommend them to anyone. Thing is, it’s slow. 24/7/365 support is all good, but with 18 hour response times, I’m finding it less easy to believe. Granted, I sometimes ask complicated questions, but a note that they’ve read my note and are working on it would be appreciated.

- Price. $20 a month (granted, I had a discount), is paying for stuff that I don’t need or use. My traffic levels aren’t massive; and I’m a student. All my income goes into my “uni pot”, so I decided that MediaTemple were too expensive for what I was looking for.

That said, I love MT. Their products are amazing (and I’m looking forward to seeing the CS product). I would recommend them to anyone; but the drawbacks I found after a year of service caused me to move on.

It’s recently struck me what a complete load of balls Hosting Comparison websites are. I’ve seen a huge number of them, and as far as I can see, they all seem to be driven by the biggest commission giving host, not by who is actually the best. And that disgusts me, because they aren’t comparing anything, their recommending the company that gives them the best payouts.

If you take a look around, there are very few websites that have MediaTemple or similar on them, because MediaTemple don’t pay comissions. Same goes for things like Fasthosts, and all the other decent sized ‘proper’ hosts. It’s all Hostgator ($100 comission per sale) and Hostmonster, and similar.

I’m considering the pros and cons of making a proper hosting site, and approaching the proper hosts to help me make it. I’ll accept no sponsorship and use no affiliate links, which means that the reviews can never be biased. I can probably afford to spend a few months with most of the major hosts, and I’ll work from there. Anyone fancy helping out?

My thoughts are that the bigger companies won’t mind linking back to their reviews on the said site, because if their any good they won’t be ashamed of what people have to say, and will maybe appreciate a non-biased view upon their services.

If anyone fancies getting involved and helping out, drop me an email, or dm me (@pearce) on twitter.

I’ve been sharing a MediaTemple account with Donald Kelly for a few weeks now. On the whole, it’s been a positive experience, apart from a few really annoying little problems (one of which keeps coming back, I’ma phone them about that).

Uptime wise, with checks every 20 minutes, it seems that fused has had 100% connectivity. Which is great. On top of that, everything is pretty fast, the features are good, and the control panel is to die for.

Unfortunately, there is a flipside. On two counts. The first is the support time, which, on a complex problem I asked them (why is Urchin 500′ing?) took them nearly a week to resolve. I had a response a few hours after submission, all well and good, saying they were flagging it to someone or another. Then nothing for 5 days.

That said, their support is friendly, normally gets the problem sorted, and doesn’t treat you as though you’re a moron (as some others do). The phone support is also excellent. I’ve not called about my account, but I’ve recently been managing a client on a (dv) with them, and when I had to phone, it was excellent.

A feature that MediaTemple have that I think was inspired is SubVersion. Whoever thought to throw that in is a genius. I upgrade all my blogs like *clicks* that, and Fused is kept up to date with the latest trunk. Time spent: 5 seconds. It’s great.

So in conclusion, three or so weeks in, the feeling is still largely positive. I have no plans to jump ship and move out, I’m quite happy here. The little problems aren’t bothering me massively at the moment, so all is good. All the rubbish about (gs) being crap is unfounded, I think it’s excellent.

Recent visitors to my blog will have noticed that (apart from the domain change) there is also something else new. I made an aside post to test that the domain was resolving nicely, but I’ve moved from my old host at HostGator (an account with whom I intend to keep for a while) to MediaTemple’s GS service.

I’ve decided to try out sharing a (gs) account with a good friend of mine, Donald Kelly. He has also written a post about the same thing – we’re going to see if two medium-traffic sites (and a low one or two) can manage to share a (gs) account effectively. Hopefully, we’ll be able to continue this until we outgrow it, and then maybe move onto a (dv). You never know.

We discussed MediaTemple for a while on AIM, before I suggested sharing. His response was something like this:

It’s worth a go!

So, we’re giving it a go. At the end, we’ll look at our stats, and see if we continue from there. I’m hoping we can manage this, if we cache our pages, then our GPU usage should stay low, and we should be able to get away with it, which would be amazing.

I’ve heard all the stuff about MT being rubbish, but to be honest, I have a long term client on a dv with them, and that’s been amazing. Support, server, uptime, the whole lot. I can’t see why gs won’t be the same, and if we hate it, we’ll leave again. It’s really that simple

As for the move, it was really simple. I’ve decided to put the innards of my blog in a subdirectory, because it keeps the main directory clear of clutter, which is always good. Then I transferred the database, and it all worked perfectly. Uptime has been 100% so far, and the control panel is beautiful. So much nicer than any others I’ve ever used.

Just got to wait for MT to sort out Urchin, and I’ll be away. I’ll post about how it went in one months time, start of September, and whether I’m staying or not.

Watch this space!

I have the feeling this will be the first of a couple of posts today (not including the scheduled aside) because I’ve got quite a lot to write about)

I finished moving GPearce, scorpiox and the others to HostGator yesterday, and picked up a problem with the image uploader. I requested support from HostGator, expecting nothing special (I heard some pretty bad stuff) but I had a response within a few hours, with the problem being repaired, and friendly advice being offered in order to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

I have had no problems with HostGator so far, and I can’t see why everyone is so unhappy (although, I’ve only had the account open a week)

I’ve moved (again) because the NOC servers were being slow, and frankly, their a bit pathetic power wise. I’m with HostGator, because despite all the crap I’ve heard about them, I have heard some really good stuff, and provided I keep backups in case something goes awry, I’m happy

Lets hope I get to stick here now