Mediatemple Hosting Outages

You are probably wondering why this site is down from time to time.

My new hosting provider, Mediatemple, recently moved to a grid-based computing scheme. The upside is it offers virtually unlimited burst capacity. The downside is they can’t seem to get it to work, and you suffer.

I switched to Mediatemple from Bluehost because of frequent Bluehost outages. Bluehost was godawful- every time another user of my shared host decided to fire up a porn or warez site my resources would go to zero. Mediatemple’s service is far superior, and their higher pricing tends to keep out the riff-raff, but this transition to grid computing could be going a lot better.

The Mediatemple folks on the phone wouldn’t provide me with details. This is the extent of my knowledge. The details of the problems are chronicled here.

As many readers know, I author, maintain, and upgrade the infrastructure that runs this site. It’s a good way to keep current with technology (though my former colleagues shudder at the thought of me hacking .php code). Unfortunately I am at the mercy of Mediatemple on this- I’ve asked them what I can do to work around the problem and the answer was ‘nothing’.

Perhaps someone will Slashdot or Digg this issue and get a little more transparency from Mediatemple on the issue. Literally thousands of customers must be affected.

I apologize. If the site is down, please come back later.