Preparing to launch a new photographic e-commerce site I decided to evaluate the quality in terms of reliability and speed of my previous host. It was clear that with the amount of domains I had and the traffic from the sites I should look out for a new host to ease administration and to speed things up.
However it’s not an easy task to choose which host and what service you want. There are so many options and different opinions. Anyway I had been looking at Media Temple for some time now, but was not really sure if that would be the right solution for my up coming sites. Fortunately Media Temple offers a “Money Back Guarantee” so after going through the term of use I went ahead and opened a Grid-Service account for $20 each month.
Media Temple is very different from my previous host – the control panel is huge and confusing but I can use ssh to log on to the service with the Terminal in OS X and play around just like any other remote computer with Linux installed.
I soon got familiarized with the interface and transferred one of my domains — a WordPress installation with about 1GB of data and a 2.5MB database. Not large but not small either. Everything went fine and following the knowledgebase the web page were up and running in no time. The site were on a .dk domain so I could just change the DNS settings at the registrar and within a few hours everything were running smoothly.
It was clear that the site loaded and opened much faster now on the Media Temple service but just to get some numbers I opened a free account on Site24x7. This site allows you to monitor response time, throughput and host up/down-time etc.
The results were clear: Media Temple were approximately 6 times faster than my previous host (often more). Even though the results are from a European origin and the Grid-Service service is located in the states. The long response is due to the WordPress installation and the php scripts and plugins that need to be processed during load. When doing the same test on a simple html page the response time drops considerately (down to 30ms).
Another issue is downtime-time and unfortunately I have experienced approximately 10 minutes of downtime during the first two weeks of monitoring. Media Temple answered promptly and explained what was going and the sites were up and running soon again.
Having moved to a new host, installed a new site, tested it for a few weeks without problems, seen the boost of my sites it is clear that I can easily host the coming e-commerce photo site to Media Temple.