Media Temple Review

Media Temple got their start in 1998 with a mission to help web developers, designers, entrepreneurs and innovators. They provide a full commitment to their customers’ success. In this review, we’re focusing on their shared web hosting offering which offers some unique features that most web hosts don’t provide that may interest the webmaster when considering the future and their website(s).

The Grid Hosting Plan Review

Media Temple is a very popular web hosting provider that offers FastCGI and easy-integration CloudFlare Cloud Hosting services with their plans. Your site’s will run up to 6x faster than the standard hosting provider by taking advantage of these features.

Reddit-Ready Bandwidth – Reddit is a social media crowd-sourced bank of Internet  information at your fingertips. If your content ever gets featured on a site like this, your site will typically get overloaded and even shut down from the heavy traffic load. With Media Temple, your site will be ready for the onslaught using the Grid scaling technology.

AccountCenter – The AccountCenter is your control panel with Media Temple. Within it, you will have ready access to install the most popular applications like WordPress, Drupal and more. Also, you’ll have the other features you’d expect such as database management, domain management and more.

Your service will come with 1,000 business-class email addresses for your domain(s). You’ll be able to easily access your messages and contacts through a clean user interface or through your favorite desktop application or mobile app.

Lastly, your MySQL databases will receive dedicated resources on their own SSD-based SmartPool system that allows guaranteed resources to your data.

Pricing Review

With their Grid Hosting platform, you’ll have one of four choices during your order. One thing nice about Media Temple is they are up front about their pricing on their site, the $20 rate they advertise is the actual monthly rate with discounts available for those that prepay. The difference here is instead of being forced into 3-5 years of prepay to get claimed pricing, instead, you’ll have the option to save additional money by going longer term (it’s all in the mindset, right?). Here’s the pricing:

• 1 Month: $20/mo
• 1 Year: $16.67/mo
• 2 Years: $15.83/mo
• 3 Years: $15/mo

The Grid Features

Every account received 100GB of disk space, 1TB of bandwidth, 100 unique websites can be hosted, 100 databases and 1,000 emails. Each plan also comes with PHP 5.5 with FastCGI. Perl 5, Python, Apache and many other features.

They also feature an upgrade path, if needed, to provide your sites with additional resources when needed. Their VPS Hosting service starts at $50/mo with over 6 plans to choose from when you are ready to make the switch.

The Upsells (Recommendations)

During the ordering process, you’ll be offered 3 different upsell opportunities depending on your needs.

• CloudTech Security Pack – $49/mo – This is a malware and virus protection service that will assist with cleanup, alerts, security monitoring and more.
• CloudTech Site Mover – $150/one time – They will move your site to Media Temple from any other web host to their service.
• Proactive Backup Setup – $39/one time – They will setup secure backups for your site(s) at regular intervals for you. Typically, you can do this yourself using their control panel.

It should be noted that most, if not all, web hosting providers do some form of security scanning on all web hosting clients to protect all users of their service. The security pack is an additional layer of protection for peace of mind, if needed. Another note, we love the fact that these features aren’t automatically enabled! The user has the choice to add them if wanted, otherwise, you can checkout for $20/mo without any hoops to jump through, a nice touch.

Customer Support Review

Media Temple offers a 24/7/365 no-excuses customer support guarantee by live chat, Twitter and toll-free telephone. They mention that their support is handled in-house, not outsourced, by technicians in their Los Angeles office.

Taking a look at their website, their support section is very easy to navigate and friendly to use. Their Knowledgebase is jammed full of awesome tips and information with thousands of entries added depending on the service you choose and the topic you are interested in learning about.

They are one of few web hosting companies willing to put their System Status information available to the public and not limited to web hosting customers only. At the time of this review, all services were online and operational, a great thing to see.

Their customer support forums appear to be slow-to-moderately used by their customers. There seams to be a relative inactivity on most sections of their forum, however, when a question is asked, they do appear to be answered by customer support as well as their own community, which is great to see.

Their Twitter account is very lively with many tweets posted every day answering customer complaints, questions, inquiries and more. Most of their answers are a direct @ reply with nothing in front, so their main Twitter page appears slow, but if you look at “Tweets and Replies” you’ll see the true activity on their account. Media Temple also appears to use the “Reply” feature in Twitter properly so that other uses can follow along in the conversation. You’d be surprised how many people get this wrong on Twitter.