James Burrage at WebKanix

In preparation for launching WebKanix I wanted to arrange some more reliable hosting. I’ve been reading about MediaTemple for a while and last week listened to the call/podcast over at TechCrunch. If there’s anything I’ve really grown to value from a hosting company it’s good support. The reputation (mt) have for support is excellent, and with folk like Jeffrey Zeldman using (mt) it became a no-brainer. I updated the nameservers on webkanix.com last night and so far so good.

The GridService (gs) seemed like the right one to go for now. Signing up is very easy and an email arrived instantly to explain that my order was pending. I waited a day before calling to enquire and the CSA sent through everything I needed within minutes. The difference implied with the name is that unlike shared hosting where a “bad neighbour” can have an effect on the speed of your website, the website is spread across hundreds of servers in tandem. This hopefully means you won’t go down under the Digg effect and that there’s no single point of failure.

In short, there’s 100GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth, on which you can host 100 sites. I’m thinking about launching a small web application in Ruby and am looking forward to testing it on (mt). Usage is measured in Grid Performance Units (GPU). The way this is displayed is very good, with a graph and large simple numbers explaining the usage. You also get a table of the top scripts and files. In this billing cycle I’ve used none, but I really don’t expect to exceed the allotted 1,000.

Once logging in first impressions are that it’s a little disorienting. Everything is there, but it’s organised very differently to anything like cPanel.

The panel itself looks amazing and it’s great to see an overview of domains and support requests with common tasks on the right hand side. Everything is well designed like this and it’s a pleasant departure from WHM when managing multiple domains. Adding a domain is easy, but managing domains requires a slightly different mindset if you’ve been a long time user of cPanel or Plesk.

Adding an email address is accessed via ‘Manage this Server’, and chosing the domain for the email address is done by using ‘all domains on this site’ or selecting just the domain you wish to use. Managing databases is fairly easy, but there is a single username and password for all of them, and you must specify the server shown in your welcome email rather than ‘localhost’. Once you get used to a different way of managing domains and their services (such as adding a subdomain as a new domain with its own services) it really is easy.

I’ve been impressed with the service so far. Everything has been quick to load and I’ve not seen any downtime. The only frustrating point has been with MX records on my main domain. In the past I’ve been able to setup email accounts on a server, then change the nameservers to point to the new server. Hopefully this gives as few problems with lost emails as possible. Apparantly it doesn’t work like that on (mt) and I can’t enable email until the MX records point to the grid.

Update 17/08/07: I checked this morning and still hadn’t had a response to my support ticket. I tried enabling mail again and it worked, although I’m now just using IMAP and not forwarding to GMail.

Update 19/08/07: MediaTemple did reply to my ticket, but only to say the problem appeared to be fixed and that I should contact them if there’s any further problems. It took 19 hours to have a reply, but I’m happy the issue is fixed and I haven’t encountered this problem when adding other domains since.

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This poorly thought out rambling was posted by me, James Burrage, on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 11:16 am and is filed under Web Development. If anyone responds to this post, you can follow them through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.