LooseSuits

Could have been a fluke, I know I have off days when an email slips through my inbox but yeah, companies shouldn't miss emails.

We use (mt) because the servers have been very solid (dedicated virtual) and... they're free. Can't beat free servers, and they've always been worth a lot more than what we paid :)

I'd also suggest calling them if it's just a few questions, I only email them on things that I know will take awhile to look into.

That's not a glowing review of their email service, Twaites... My host usually replies to emails (sales or support) within the hour whatever hour of whatever day it happens to be...

Perhaps I'm just lucky though.

(mt) Support is amazing, I called them around 2am because there was something with my sql thingy...

what i hate about them...

i kept getting the sql error so i moved my blog to dreamhost but some of my sites are still on the (gs)

what i like about them...

they give you free stuff!!!! they gave me some shit last xmas

http://ralph.fm/2006/12/12/schwagsss-from-mt-media-temple/

I'm thinking about switching from (mt):

• Their support has been really bad recently (they had no idea why my site went down, recently, but it mysteriously came back up about a minute after they replied to my support request saying that - also, th einitial support request had been send 10 hours ago);
• I've been having very occasional down time, which though minimal, is more than it used to be;
• the control panel setup is just weird;
• there's no reason for me to pay that much for web hosting when I rarely break 10k visitors a month;
• they never give me free shit.

Hi, I had a similar issue when I tried to contact them about signing up for the Grid Server account, I sent emails through their site but I don't think they arrived as the email form just refreshed and didn't give me any confirmation. In the end I just signed up anyway and tried it out, I didn't keep it on though but it does seem like a good service. I just need a host to be in the UK really.

You should check out Mosso, they have a very good grid cluster hosting system provided by Rackspace's network. I'm very tempted to use them, but it's the whole hosting in the US thing again, all my clients are UK based and I just have apprehensions about using a US host.

There is such a big opportunity for MediaTemple, Mosso etc to just make the UK hosting market much more appealing!

I recently cashed into MT with their new Grid Servers. Compared to other hosts they have been pretty much on the ball with the problems their customers are facing and tend to listen to their problems. With the new Grid Servers initially there was a lot of down time particularly with the databases but this seems to be all sorted out. To be honest with any host you go with you are going to get some problems and MT has handled it well even going out of their way to compensate me.

Like Mike says it sounds like a fluke and I would try again.

I'm currently on Dreamhost, and it's... Average I guess. Good support, but no cPanel (I don't care- their alternative is fine.) and it can be slow. I thought of switching to (mt) and sent them an email with some questions, figuring if through that one contact experience they are better than DH in 5 or so points I'll make the switch.

First off, gotta check the plans. $20/mo was the cheapest, so its DH:1, MT:0. So send this long email with like 5 questions. I get a reply a week later. DH:2, MT:0. The email basically told me nothing, except that $20/mo was their cheapest, and they weren't going to haggle, they don't have cPanel and some other side stepping answers.

Definitely not a good experience. No cPanel, and worse storage and xfer than my $7.95/mo that went down to like $1.95/mo? Definitely not. Right after I also started hearing bad things about (mt).

Yeah I paid $2.50/month for my dreamhost hosting this year. Considering what I get, that's just amazing.

I only use them for hosting my images and a couple of small sites (my main host is a windows one) because their bandwidth and disk space is awesome.

I also use them to backup my data from here. I've got 200gigs of space I can use with them... Why shouldn't I?!

DH just have a cool vibe going on. If you read their blog and even the regularity and completeness of their status blog, you know they're doing everything they can to make everything as excellent as possible for all their customers.

Whereas their actual hosting is massively shared and there's overselling (as with every hosting company -- unless you want to be ripped off) they do provide good service. Not the best but 1000x what you'd expect for the cash handed over. And their support is fast and helpful.

Yeah, I'm also at DH. I find the features they offer are amazing compared to the price they charge.
And althought there are brief outages here and there, they are very straight forward with the cleaning up. RSS feed to keep you up-to-date on status of things and a very very quick support team.
And then they have a cool referal system that pays up from time to time, which is also very cool.

Interestingly, both Dreamhost and Media Temple have ridiculous control panels.

I guess they need their own solution because their hosting is so different to standard hosts.

I wouldn't say DH's is ridiculous though... it does the job well.

Speaking of the referral system, I've made more from Dreamhost, than I've paid up for the hosting... By quite some way.

I experienced ridiculous amounts of downtime with DreamHost and they just kept blowing it off and not admitting to anything.

I switched over to MediaTemple after hearing such great things about them, but then found they have a lot of bugs yet to work out with their gridserver and even have a limit to the amount of CPU cycles that you can be using. Their support is as weak as DreamHost, but at least my entire site doesn't go down for 10 hours at a time with no response.

Mike {mt} has free server ? I dont understand what do you mean?

I never impressed with such companies who has poor support. You know support is key in the business.. I am currently with http://servage.net/ and they are damn fast in support .. i have always got replay in one hour believe it or not... It's true. they are providing.. damn large amount of space and bandwidth.

I am freelance webdesigner and I have seen that lots big web designing companies uses {mt} thats why I was kinda inspired to try them..

Aloha 9Rulers.
I'll try to address some of the more general issues raised with (mt).

With the launch of the Grid, we have certainly experieinced more issues than EVER in our company's history. In an attempt to encourage transparency, be as responsove as possible and further keep our customers in the loop, we launched our blog (which details many of the issues and solutions we're implementing), have almost doubled our support and admin staff and offered a credit to those customers that were on the Grid and experienced downtime due to the general database/storage device issue, which has caused the bulk of load time issues

http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/

regarding the more specific sales/support issues, please email me with details and i will further investigate these issues and address them accordingly.

Best regards,
Jason McVearry
(mt) Media Temple
Partner Director
jason@mediatemple.net

It's fairly obvious why people use MediaTemple... so they can put the hosted by MT badge on their site :P

My experience with MT is that if you want an answer, phone. Then they are quite good; had a ticket waiting for two days last week, and when I finally needed an answer, I called. This has been my approach and I have found their phone staff to be fast and helpful.

Mike,

Please email me. I'd like to track your ticket and talk to our Support manager about this. Two days is not common and unacceptable. There's no better way to improve than to take these issues one by one and figure out how to solve the problem that created this delay

Jason@mediatemple.net

Thanks
J

Damn, Media Temple representatives in 9rules notes. That's awesome.

Though it does mean they saw me badmouthing them... Now I'll never get free swag from them.

Yeah, that's pretty sweet to get a response like that from MT. Nice work Jason. Did you track this thread from Technorati or are your a 9rules reader?

Damn, Media Temple representatives in 9rules notes. That's awesome.

Is it? Now people might be wary that is they speak their minds and it clashes with (mt)'s opinion... well... It's not exactly hard to find their website and see if they're an existing customer from their profile page.

NOT that I'm saying (mt) would just I've found that conversations about companies tend to be a lot more honest when everybody involved isn't afraid of (or, oppositely, wanting to show off to) the local rep. of that company.

You could also say that chasing your customers around on the internet looking where there is a fuss building up and tackling complaints on a 1-to-1 basis isn't the most pro-active approach to helping all your customers... Just going through open tickets ordered by "last interaction" date/time should fix that.

Ignore me, Jason. I'm a marketing cynic.

Oli,

We don't mind negative discourse. We've learned A LOT about our customers' needs via negative discourse. I think you'll find we don't try to scew the argument unfairly, we are simply looking for solutions.

Cheers,
Jason

My last support request (not last ticket) sent through Media Temple's system took something like 25 replies to resolve; I kept getting the same damn automated messages over and over again. I certainly wasn't impressed by that, and I think I'll be jumping ship once my term is over.

I'm sure you wouldn't actively do something like that but I'm equally sure that other companies might.

No, more than that I meant the passive effect that there being an official in here might make people watch their words or go overly "pluggy" in an effort to get recognised and gain something from it.

By the way, in terms of feedback, I'd really like some solid Windows hosting =) I've noticed some of your packages say you can install anything... Does that include Win2k3 and IIS?

Hey Winnopeg,

Send me the domain you are referring to and I'll track the ticket and follow up to see why we couldn't solve your specific issue.

jason@mediatemple.net
J

Oli,

File a support ticket and they'll get back to you. ;)

Oli,

Regarding companies being involved in blog/online discussions, I think it's only fair to hear their side, whatever the situation may be. Often times, people request our presence in online discussion to clarify issues.

A far as our virtual pacakges, no, you can not install Win2k3 as the platform runs on linux. To host windows at (mt), you need to purchase a dedicated box.

And rich is right..for mt sales questions, it's prudent to contact them directly. I'm not a sales/product expert.

Jason

jmcvearrymt

i havent got the replay still.. i posted in blog and sent you email also.. but never got replay

i wanted to switch to MT .. i am again emailing you.. hope i will get answer soon

and plz make better email support

hi jason

i sent first ticket at 6th February i never get replay and i have sent another email yesterday will show when i will get replay

i am not particularly talk about you Jason but general email support of Mediatemple

Thanks Jason, message sent :-)

I'm a happy customer at Mediatemple. Recently I sent them an email about a lot of spam I got. This are parts of the emails they sent as responses:

Alexander,
Yes, spammers are in the practice of using any from address they can get their hands on. And most of the time they do not even need to exist. You have a catch-all setup that is catching all of this spam bounceback. A simple solution would be to remove the catch-all. Another option would be to use an SPF record but this does not always work. Please let us know if you would like for us to setup an SPF record for that domain and if you have a specific SPF record you would like for us to use, or we can use a generic one.

I should know about SPF records but I didn't exactly know what the consequences would be for me so I asked them. Instead of referring me to a KnowledgeBase article I got a personal response where they explained what would change in my personal case. When I told them to go ahead I received another email:

Alexander,
We have (...) added the SPF records for you. (...) It was a pleasure to be of service to you.

All in all it took under a day to fix my spam issue and I had to do nothing but ask them what I could do to fix the problem. Honestly, I don't know about your experiences with other companies but that was the most friendly answer to a support request I received, ever. Things like that make sure they keep me as a customer for a long time.

I've been having email issues with Media Temple. Emails sent from media temple mail servers do not get delivered to address sent to ehostpros.com email accounts. I've been working with ehostpros and they said to acquire the media temple grep log while sending mail from mediatemple.net. Media Temple will not get me this log for it is against their policy. Media Temple informed me today of this policy. My initial support ticket with Media Temple requested the grep log and it took them 11 days to tell me i couldn't have one. Anyway, I don't know what to do.

As far as service goes, Media Temple does not respond well to support tickets. Responses have been recorded only after a phone conversations. They've told us they're looking into the issue and will CALL us back, but no one does. The 2 responses(to my 7 requests) they entered took at least 24 hours.

I don't like to promote Ehostpros because they've had some hangups as well. The difference however is price and response time. Ehostpros will respond to support tickets in 1-3 hours. Ehostpros is 3.00/mo. Media Temple is 20.00/mo for crappy service.

junkjunk: As Jason said above these are the types of things he wants to know about. Sometimes emailing someone higher up is the way to make them aware of issues like this. Jason's email is jason@mediatemple.net.

Jason, email sent.

So far, my experiences with MediaTemple have been pretty cool. I'm sure that they aren't too happy with me though as my last two bill cycles haven't been paid on time (ooops). All in all though, I think they are doing a well enough job.

I signed up for the service a month or so after they launched the new GridServer platform, so I haven't experienced any of the pain that people like Matt Brett have. Everything has been pretty cool. Setting up email was a breeze, setting up MySQL databases for my various lab projects have been ease enough.... generally, things have been cool.

In terms of emailing them and such, whenever I did need to have something resolved (billing), I just called the toll free number and spoke to someone direct. As with everything else, your mileage may vary.....

For people who where asked by Jason for e-mails, has anybody heard back from him?

hi mikep_

yes Jason replied me already and I also finally got the replay from media temple.. they replay me at least..

cheers

* hand raised *

My two cents: Customer Service is in the eye of the beholder.

So, in extension of Oli's point, I assert that it is important to know what kind of a customer you are as you rant or gloat in this note.

Mike Rundle is not a paying customer -- he gets his for free -- Mike's comment: "they have always been worth a lot more than what we paid" -- is not really saying anything.

I am a paying (mt) customer. I am on gs. I have NOT had "switch-worthy" problems with (mt) or its support.

Yes, my sites go down sporadically (I watch it via Monastic). They go down more than I would like -- every 5 days or so (on average); sometimes briefly, sometimes for 30 minutes or so. Nevertheless, I am not ready to switch -- BUT THEN I run personal sites -- not production sites, not commerce sites. I could understand if someone in a different situation were less patient than me.

Yes, I loath the "initial" automated responses (but that is part of the "we got the ticket" / "it has been docketed" / "we will get to it" step).

Yes, I loath the cut and paste "form language" that doesn't answer the question -- but rather underscores the fact that the person didn't actually read the ticket. But, for me, those have been few and far between -- and I have used the ticket system a fair bit.

But back to why I still like (mt):
* (mt) is now posting (on the "public" side of its website) "system-wide problem reports" and "updates on progress" in a more transparent way -- my former hosting providers never did that (on the public site or the customer side of the website). Sometimes it is comforting to know that my little problem is pissing off others less patient than me.
* (mt) is pushing out global fixes with great gusto.
* ...and the biggest...When (mt) had all the initial problems with gs and my sites were down for hours and hours, they sent me a credit for two months of service. AGAIN, if I ran other types of sites, I might not feel that was much compensation -- but I run the sites I run and for me, their gesture re-validated my view of them as a company.

I am +1 on (mt).

And no Oli, they have not given me any schwag....

What happened here? Did I kill off all discourse? Or does no one care anymore?

My email issues have been solved... at least for the past 12 hours. It started working about 3 hours after my first post. After 2 weeks of issues, I'm elated to find it working now.

Chacon, I still am not thrilled with the service of MT. They haven't responded to me formally on my support ticket yet. Are they aware that the problem is solved or going to attempt to let me know it's been corrected? I felt neglected until we started threatening to switch hosts. I'm sure you and others have had better experiences. Perhaps we were just assigned a weakened or skeleton crew.

Thanks for the support.

Hey dotcommakers, I never did hear back from Jason, but I'll assume that it was a spam issue or something :-)