this is short path, it doesnt mean they dnt consider other users, but might be they account it differently…

I still have my domain names hosted at DH because MT does not provide a privacy service (if they did, I’d transfer the whole lot over in a snap) - that would be my only ‘complaint’ with MT, and that’s hardly a complaint.

I’ve used a number of other hosts in the past too - HostMonster (aka BlueHost) was horrible - CPU load extremely restricted, and overuse caused automatic take-down of your entire site temporarily. You can’t rebuild a small MovableType blog on it, it was that bad.

phpwebhosting was ok for a while, but seemed to go downhill about a year ago with downtimes.

There were others not worth mentioning. I’m happy with MT.

HostMySite is terrific in terms of Customer Support, it has never taken me more than an hour to have anything fixed, yes anything. MT’s Support is definitely no match for it. It took me quite sometime to get answers to basic queries.

After all, if you intend to start a decent service, using servers which are not inside your country, it helps to have excellent customer support, because the server is the heart of the my service, I just can’t give to somebody I can’t trust.

But yeah, MT is the hot one. Most of the good sites are on MediaTemple. I came here first with a link from TechCrunch, then Mootools, and so many in between.

Though I’m yet to see if HostMySite can survive a Digg. I did survive getting listed on LifeHacker though. But maybe it’s not the same.

To clarify a few things:

-No matter which “path” a user connects to your site through, the only time you recieve a charge is when your monthly bandwidth exceeds your monthly limit (which is, regardless of which service you choose, at least 1TB. Again, that’s a composite total, regardless of what percentage came from which path. Just to give you an idea of how much that it is, it easily survives the “digg effect” more than once in a single month).

-Check out: “How are project costs calculated” for information regarding
how/when/why bandwidth warnings are sent to you.

-Containers: I was confused at first to what a container was exactly. In short, its a security measure. Unlike other shared hosting services (Dreamhost for example) where if you pull an idiot and crash your server, then everyone on that server goes down. Whereas on mt only your site goes down (and quickly reboots). I’ve never managed to crash a container (and I’ve tried for security and assurance purposes). I’ve also never lost any data from them either. Simply replace the word container with “mini-server” and you get the idea.

-GPU (”Grid Processing Units”): I can’t honestly tell you what these are for sure, physically, but I know the concept. The grid is made up of an array of GPU’s. GPU’s have a certain amount of resources dedicated to them (1GB Bandwidth, x amount of memory, x amount of storage etc). These GPU’s are connected together into packages, (generally in groups of 1000 in the case of the base level Grid hosting package I think). If you need more bandwidth or whatever they simply add GPU’s. Think of them as servers that you can plug into each other and add their resources together to form a new, bigger server.

-The Grid: The grid is made up of a large number of GPU’s, and allocates them as necessary. Say your account has a maximum GPU count of 1000 (typical for a base gs package). These are not dedicated to you at all times (otherwise it would be called dedicated hosting), just the ones that you need to meet the demands on your account. The GPU’s that your site is not actively using are available to be “outsourced” (or shared) to other users to handle unusual spikes in activity (such as the digg effect). The idea is to offer supreme scalability, and inter-grid resource allocation, as well as resource monitoring services.

-Uptime, downtime, and latencies: This is my only criticism for them. A lot of people complain of “excessive downtimes.” while I’m sure my servers have experienced downtimes, I’ve never witnessed it first hand. They notify in advance of any planned maintenance etc and the only times I’ve ever heard of “spontaneous” downtime have been isolated incidents in which I could never find multiple people reporting that problem within the same timeframe. As far as load times and latencies it is a bit slow (down speeds are around 100kb/s on average for me, my upspeed is limited by my ISP to a very low level and I rarely see uploads of more than 50kb/s on any server, mt or otherwise, and my mt uploads usually tends to hit that so I can’t say much there). However, considering the excessive storage space, enormous bandwidth and overall feature set of the site I’m quite happy with it.

-Knowledgebase and support: Their knowledgeBase (inhouse FAQ/Tutorial database of sorts) is still growing and is pretty comprehensive at the moment. Much better than it was when I first started. I’d give it 7/10 stars for overall helpfulness as well as quality, but a 6/10 for people new to the process of remote web hosting in general. As for as customer support… I don’t know. I haven’t used it much but the times that I did it didn’t leave a “Wow” impression but I didn’t think “damn that sucks” either. I’ve heard mixed things, to each his own.

In short: I’m very happy with their services and intend to continue my services with them well in the future.

Overall I am pretty happy with the service. A lot of people have beef with the term Gridserver being misleading. Technically, we’re not in a grid environment, however putting 100 websites over 10 boxes is better than 10 websites over one box and helps to average out the load. In the first couple months, there were a lot of problems with the speed of their MySQL server, but these seem to be fixed now. Im pretty happy. It could be better, but for the price, my load speed has been sacrificed a little for a larger featureset. If they could get the load speed up, I would highly recommend it to everyone.