I moved my blog, Hardware Revolution from MT GS service to a Linux VPS and I couldn’t be happier about the result.

If you’re still hesitating, go for it, you won’t regret it. I sure didn’t!

I use a plugin to track latency time on my Wordpress blog and it went from an average of 1.5 seconds on Media Temple to 0.23 second on my Linux VPS.

If you unsure which VPS to choose, I recommend Linode (Link in name), who offer good prices, excellent reliability, free upgrades on a regular basis and the best of all, an outstanding community ready to help you learn Linux. I was a total Linux noob, took some time to learn and now my blog is running really fast on my Linux VPS =D

I can with no doubt say, that if MT have improved over the last years, I dont even wanna think about how bad the conditions have been then.

I really consider moving the 10 domains I have at MT’s gs service.

Thanks for the post and all the comments to enlighten my head and ease my decision!

I’ve transferred my Wordpress blog from 1&1 shared to MT GS service in Jan. 2009, hoping to be able to handle social media spikes (known as the Digg effect).

I’ve been frustrated since then. Not only my load times increased but the GS service failed to deliver when one of my post got popular on Digg.

1st thing: 5 minutes downtime to “move to a dedicated MySql container” in order to handle the traffic.

Excuse me? My blog just went live on Digg and your way to handle it to take down my blog for the first 5 minutes, which are critical for traffic??? Way to hurt my reputation too.

Then, after the “upgrade”: Text wise, no problem. But my theme kept going down. Basically, MT could handle the text version of my blog, but not with the theme!?

No need to say that MT was a big deception that day.

Since then, I’ve been looking into solutions and explanations. This post on MT and Wordpress problems is golden.

I’ve now contacted surpasshosting, with the details of my blog/needs. Looking forward to hear back =)

@Mark Z: Looks like you finally made the switch to a decent host. Congrats! :-)

Just after posting my comment on here yesterday, a rep called me from MT. I had escalated my complaining before that to a new level: threatening legal action. Not surprisingly, they jumped. The rep was extremely helpful and understanding (so it seems) of my frustration, and he’s arrange for me to be able to move all my stuff to a different, newer cluster. The cluster my sites are on has LOTS of problems, so I’m hoping this will help.

However, I am not going to get my hopes up, and should I wind up w/ the same problems, I’ll be moving to a new hosting provider. Regardless, I’m going to Surpass Hosting’s site to do my homework, so thanks again for the suggestion!

Once the server I was on totally failed, and they had restored our sites within 24 hours. They emailed us, and were very courteous about it. Media Temple does no such thing.

Uptime is amazing. The only time to date (since I switched in September) that they’re service was unavailable was with the total failure mentioned about.

http://www.surpasshosting.com! Their prices are very competitive for what you get (far better than Media Temple).

Let me know what you decide to do! I know they aren’t a “big brand” like ASO or (mt), but you will be pleasantly surprised.

MT was pretty good when I first started hosting with them a couple years ago, but in the last year, the service has been horrendous. In the last few weeks, my sites and emails have been down almost every day. Once instance, they were down for 4 days straight. The answer, as usual, “not our fault”.

Thank you, Matt (and all commenters) for all the valuable information. I am now seriously beginning my search for a more reliable hosting situation, so if there are any more suggestions (other than Webfaction and ASO, both of which I’m currently looking into), please share. I’m in the States, so a “local” company is preferable.

Again, thanks all. You’ve all contributed greatly to me not going completely insane!!

BTW, as I write this… surprise, my sites/emails are DOWN. Been this way for almost 5 hours now. So much for a relaxing weekend :)

It seems this has been a problem for quite some time now, and my form-response from support does little to make me feel better about future improvement. I guess I’ll be moving on as soon as I can find another reliable host.