Media Temple is a popular hosting company who has been using very slick marketing for the past two years to sell their popular Grid Service. If you had a look at their website, and read the write ups about the Grid, they make it seem like you are getting extreme dedicated server power for a shared hosting price. They describe incredible uptime and the ability to handle large bursts of traffic from site like Digg.  But does it? No. MT has failed to handle the Digg effect at each opportunity.

I’ll admit, I was a sucker. When I first read about MT’s Grid service, I fell for the hype. I eventually moved all of my websites to a dedicated server because of the constant short term outages, and occasional long term failures (24+ continuous hours of downtime) of the Grid. But I kept my MT account alive just so I can use it for backup if needed (which has never been necessary since I left MT), and because I still have a few sites hosted on it.

Last weekend I went to update one of those sites and found it down. What followed was another 24hr.+ downtime incident. MT’s support wasn’t even answering the phone. They finally posted a long explanation admitting to their failures and mistakes. The problem I have with it is, that the Blue Arc storage system has been one of the biggest reasons the Grid service has sucked to date, and they finally admit that and decide to do away with it! This should have occurred a year ago. Doh! At least I’ve had two full-month refunds from them.

The blog posts states that they are moving us (the customers on the “old” grid) to a much more stable “new grid,” but that it could take until June (!) 2009 for us to get this quality service. Great, I can’t wait. 🙁