Exactly an year back I wrote about moving this blog from GoDaddy to Dreamhost. The story continues and this year I have moved to Media Temple (referral link).
I had considered Media Temple last year, however the site revenues weren’t enough to match the rates quoted by Media Temple. Even this time around I thought a lot before choosing Media Temple. I did see a lot of negative reviews on Media Temple but I guess you would see that for every other hosting provider.
You need to use the service to come to a conclusion and MT does have a 30 day money back guarantee option.
Why shift from Dreamhost ?
One main reason was the downtime that this site experienced while running on Dreamhost. At one point of time, the pingdom service used to report a downtime almost every day.
The site speed also was no way near to normal and this definitely affected the pageviews (People who come via search engine referral would hesitate to explore the site, if the landing page is too slow)
One positive thing about Dreamhost is the quality of support. I got response for almost all my support queries and unlike the site response time, I have no complaints on the support response time !
Isn’t MT expensive ?
Some of the best hosting options would cost around 10-12$/month and MT quotes around 20$/month.
However if you do a 1 year pre-payment you do save 40$. I used a coupon code and saved another 15% to finally end up with 14$/month charge which in my opinion isn’t too much if your site is monetized.
And you do have the option of reselling the hosting and this can also help in bringing down the monthly expense.
Isn’t moving data a pain ?
Moving all the data from one server to another is a time consuming task and is one of the reasons users would hesitate to switch to a different hosting. Unlike my previous move from GoDaddy to Dreamhost, this time around I had a lot of data to move !
Transferring the data from Dreamhost to my local system and then transferring it back to Media Temple would have definitely taken time. However I used one simple yet powerful SCP command to transfer the files within 10 minutes !
For e.g. to move my entire domain related files (not the database), I just executed the following command from the SSH terminal on my Dreamhost server
scp -r venukb.com user@mediatempleaccessdomain:/backup
Note: For the above approach to work, you need to signup with MT and should have received the Access Domain related data and the login credentials for the access domain
I also dumped the database using mysqldump and again used SCP to move the SQL files onto the MT server.
The transfer was done at a blazing speed of 2MB/second. Once the data was moved, all I had to do was to move the domain related files to the MT specific server paths and restoring the SQL data on to the newly created MySQL database on MT grid.
You can even test the new setup by modifying your hosts file on Windows (i.e. I pointed venukb.com to the new MT server) and once its tested you can go ahead and modify the name servers to point to the new domain (This modification in the DNS will take some time to propagate)
Is MT worth the price ?
It just been 2 days and I am not in the state to comment on the hosting performance and support. In a few days I should be able to make a good judgement on MT and will definitely keep you posted 🙂
If anybody is already on MT, let me know how your experience has been till now (I do read a lot of posts where people write about moving to MT, but have seen very few who have written about the actual experience ! )
Meanwhile for all those keeping a tab on this blog’s RSS feed, please do open up this post in a browser and let me know if the site is loading up fast :). It’s also an opportunity for you to checkout the new theme running on this blog 🙂
Comments on this entry are closed.
Opened ur site on a browser as u wished (after a loooong time actually 😉 )
It does seem faster than what it was before, but at $14 pm it should be.
Thats a quick load. I think your speed woes are over now. At some point, I used to feel lazy to comment on the posts since it was slow 🙂
It is kinda expensive though…I pay about 8$ a month @ hostmonster. It works well for me since I have unlimited addon domains…But someone was telling me the other day that paying for a year is a bad idea since you have already paid, the support goes down the drain 🙂
Either ways, keep us updated….good luck. I cannot even imagine moving all my sites! Too much work to bother about.
the commment freeze when submitting is also gone here now 🙂
It loaded pretty fast!
The site does load faster now. Thats something I wish for my blog too but at my current hosting’s cost, I am happy! I have one question though – What’s with the random pictures on the sidebar?
Thanks to all of you for checking on the loading speed ! And as harish mentioned if the site was still slow after paying 14 $ I better go for the 30 day money back option 🙂
@Anand I agree paying for a year is like being imprisoned for that period.. but the savings are worth that trouble for me as of now 🙂
@Vasu, thanks for checking as always 🙂
@Raj,
You did not mention your hosting cost.. guess you didn’t want me to feel miserable 🙂
Random Images ? Its a feature of this theme and I do intend to make use of that big space for some other purpose, as of now if its grabbing users attention, that is all I need 🙂
great to hear it worked for you, i am in the exact same position. I have had it with dreamhost and looking into MT. Thanks for sharing your experience! I have about 10 sites on dreamhost and am dreading the move.
I also recommend WebFaction ( http://www.webfaction.com ).
See http://www.istherefood.com/2008/03/27/webfaction-versus-media-temple/ for a comparison between the two (in short, WebFaction is much faster).
Dave,
Glad that the post would be of some motivation for your planned move (I do see that you are still on Dreamhost 🙂 )
Bruce,
Had never heard of Webfaction till I saw your comment. Your post is definitely motivating me to checkout Webfaction !
Just checked on their pricing, its almost as expensive as MT right ?
I’m loving the theme over here. Where did you get it? Or did you make it yourself?
Congrats on the move, hope you have a good time with MT.
Shankar,
Glad you liked the theme. Its a paid theme developed by Chris Pearson. You can check on DiyThemes !
Nirmal,
Thanks for the wishes, hope the site gets some traffic matching the expensive hosting 🙂
Hey Venukb,
I’m considering a move from GoDaddy to Dreamhost. Their VP servers (http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-vps.html) seem like a good deal considering you can adjust the server resources to match your needs.
Was the hosting account you had a Dreamhost shared or a VP server? How are you liking MT now? Do you have to do all the maintenance at MT yourself?