Last March I decided that Dreamhost weren’t reliable enough for me, and all my good friends pimped (mt) mediatemple like there was no tomorrow. Mediatemple, although slightly more expensive are known for their support. You get what you pay for.
I have been playing around with Rails for a year and a half, some have called me an ‘early adopter’ due to it. But I never wrote any serious code that I wanted to share. My first application was due to be released back last November but I couldn’t release it, Rails on MediaTemple was playing up and I was having issues. I left the application as it wasn’t important as it was only for learning purposes.
My fiancé came to me last week, asking if I would write her a Rails poll for her Psychology experiment. I worked on it and uploaded it, after a sleuth of problems I finally get it working on the web server. Happy with my success, I head to bed. For what I didn’t know was I’d be woken up the next day by a “The poll is not working.”, it fell over somehow in the middle of the night. It had only been used by 20 people and the application is one page. Throughout the time that the poll was alive, this happened constantly, making me ssh in and restart the poll.
Since then, I’ve had SVN troubles, for some reason it won’t recognize my password. The answer I got:
Subversion is installed and ready to use on the Grid. Please see our KnowledgeBase for complete instructions regarding how to set up and connect to a repository: http://kb.mediatemple.net/article.php?id=143
…
Any other configuration falls outside our scope of support. (mt) Media Temple supports the basic operation and uptime.We also ensure that the environment we provide you with can install all of the components needed.
If you do not speak “Support tech”, this roughly translates to “Not our problem, son”. Constantly do I get a RTFM when I ask for support, in fact I expect it so much I wince when I first send it off as I know I have to wait for such a response.
MediaTemple support has gone very downhill since their new move.
“The not our problem” part is true. I am going to be moving to Slicehost in 2 weeks, although a VPS it should actually work. I was going to go with Engine Yard but hey are too expensive for what I need at this moment.
Exactly the same experience as me. I’m looking for a host that offers the same features but has a better support system, and doesn’t use Plesk for the backend. Steelpixel is good - I use them for specific projects, and am waiting for them to release their multiuser backend so I can resell. Going to take a look at Slicehost and Engine Yard based on your recommendations though. Thanks for the article. I’m glad I’m not the only person who’s had these problems with (mt). I was beginning to wonder if it was a chick thing. And I hate doing that.
Yes, you will not get great tech support from MT. I like them primarily because I can get enough control over the machine so i can fix issues by myself, and there are some conveniences with the way they have DNS set up. However, compared to my previous hosts, they are not very quick on the response side of things.
Would you be willing to share the poll code?, I am trying to set up a poll for my intranet, and because I am a newbie I have no idea how to start. Thank you.