Once in a while Media Temple would send me a mail telling me that my database is overloaded or something and place me into a ’special’ program for 3 days where I get special utilities to manage the database. You will stop feeling special after they send four or five such things.
It makes me wonder how bad can I hit the database. I run this blog and a couple of other things using my Media Temple account and, base on analytics software (I use Google), this blog is most visited site among the sites hosted in my account.
I already run WP super cache, set it to use cache for 12 hours. It didn’t work. Media Temple returns to complain about my database again. And the analysis tools they provide is unable to give me any information on how to improve the database.
Eventually I decide to just ignore it. And a couple of months passed and they stopped complaining which is great. I love it when I don’t have email. So I decide to do an experiment:
I switch off caching.
So no caching, calls the database like crazy, see what happens. Two and a half weeks has passed, no email from Media Temple (I feel so lonely). The database have higher number of queries, my GPU is depleted at a greater speed, but no email.
My visitors didn’t drop last I check. So I presume… Media Temple’s database are more tolerant already. Previously, they’ve been hit by some technical issues. I probably won’t leave Media Temple just yet. I’ll wait-and-see. But I don’t think I have confidence to up my account to a better plan with them.
Anyway, if you’re interested in Media Temple and would be kind enough, consider quoting ‘RYNSE.COM’ without quotes as your referrer. This would give me a bit of discount for my yearly subscriptions. Thanks.
Saw this at the Media Temple blog:
Update: April 8, 2008
We would like to extend our thanks for the continued understanding and patience of all of our customers affected by this incident. In an effort to bring you up to date we would like to share where we stand at this time.
Through internal testing and the continuing evaluation of our systems, (mt) Media Temple has concluded that the recent availability and latency problems of the (gs) Grid-Service product are related to segments of our current storage architecture.
Some time ago, we brought online additional storage resources to alleviate anticipated pressure points. Although we did see some very positive short-term improvements, things did not scale as far as our original projections showed. In order to meet these demands we are currently preparing additional hardware resources, to be completed and in place later today. Over the next few days and weeks, we will be rebalancing the storage load onto these new resources.
We would like all of our customers impacted by this to understand that weâre doing our best to provide a service that in no way exhibits the behavior you are currently seeing. This is our top priority and we are acting accordingly. Whenever possible, weâve been able to minimize the length of time your service has been affected. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the small service interruptions that you have likely experienced during the course of this incident.
This System Status posting will continue to provide timely updates that have meaningful, useful information. Until such time we respectfully ask that any support requests that you have attached to this incident stay open. We promise to provide updates to this System Status blog, and notify any users that have submitted a support request related to these events. These two channels are currently the most effective way we can communicate vital information to our clients.
So no refund? Hahaa…
Media Temple has been hit by numerous issues recently. Things are responding slow. A couple of times I just lose my patience and went to bed. I hope things will be okay soon.
[By the way, I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5. It perks me up looking at the new interface, it's beautiful. I saw many comments complaining about the colors, the interface and the bugs. Perhaps I'm a little more forgiving here. I really love the colors and the interface! Not really loving the bugs though. Still a splendid job by the WordPress dev team. It's a work of art.]
One of the websites (not //beconfused) I managed got hacked. My host pointed out an exploit in WordPress and said that intruders have planted a spam email sender. The WordPress installed is 2.2 and yeah I didn’t update when 2.2.1 was out. But the exploit is not among those that are fixed which is puzzling. Perhaps it’s really a new exploit, I’m still waiting for the web host to give me more details. Honestly… I am a little confused, I don’t know how to handle these stuff.
And my blog is going to max out the bandwidth again it seems. I am already using a business plan and it seems to be insufficient. My bandwidth is 40 GB per month and I am hitting the limit. I just upgraded 3 months back actually, it used to be 20 GB per month. I didn’t explain it to outgrow that quickly! I thought I would probably grow to using more than 30 GB per month probably the start of next year at the earliest. (Yes, I kinda got it charted out.) (more…)
I was looking around blogs today and there’s some discussion on web hosting in Singapore. I’ve been thinking about hosting some websites locally. But the prices don’t seem to be very right. Worse - it’s not reputable enough.
Searching for reliable webhosts is probably the most time consuming thing, it’s worse than doing sai-kang in army I tell you. I went through countless reviews and forums to finally decide what to get. I had a couple of bad experiences and it’s enough to make to say no to really cheap hosting.
My previous host just suspended me and say I use too much resources. I was like “What? What resources? But I didn’t exceed my bandwidth limit for the month!” Their reply to me is in a form of a kiddy email, “your website is affecting our other customers hosting in the same machine as you.” They recommended me a dedicated machine which I said no too. I think it’s US$48, ah crap.
So I left when I had a chance to ICD Soft. My experience with ICD Soft is pretty good. They seem to know what they are doing at least. I pay US$10 per month to get some crappy disk space and rather limiting transfer rates. But the service is good (very pleased with them actually), they never complained to me before. The best nights to sleep in are those you know your website will still function at 4 AM in the morning. Opps, that sounds awfully geeky. Sorry! (more…)
Great little experiment with 9 different hosting companies to figure out which ones can withstand the traffic surges caused by Web 2.0.
When too many people visit a website at the same time, it tends to slow down the server so badly it starts to time out. Below is a list of web host that is being tested to see how well they can withstand the Digg effect. The list is not fantastic but still worth taking a look if you’re looking for a host. I’m hunting for a new host already. My host has been great but it isn’t going to support my bandwidth much longer unfortunately.
I intend to host multiple websites too so I’m looking for web host. Probably going with MediaTemple. They seem to be pretty good at what they do.
read more | digg story
Oh, forget PhotoBucket and ImageShack or whatever, those are too troublesome. Try another free image hosting service - AllYouCanUpload.com, by the CNet guys.
The service doesn’t require you to sign up. Just a simple upload and link it. They won’t resize your image without your consent, lower your quality or even impose a bandwidth limit. It’s just the dead simple upload and use.
You can read more about it from Martin Green’s blog
[via Techcrunch]
Oh yeah, I uploaded their header just to try them out. It’s quite fast too by the way.
Hello people,
I mentioned in the previous post of a migration. If you’re seeing this post, it means that you’re at the new host’s servers. I left SurpassHosting for ICDSoft. I hope it would be enough to support my site.
I think that there are some comments that are lost. I am sorry about it. I can’t access the SurpassHosting site already. They are lost forever. If your comment is lost, I’m really sorry about it and you can only repost the comment.
Tags are activated in this host once again. I’m changing the design again soon. I hope it’ll be good for your eyes.
This host seems slightly faster. My available bandwidth is not as much as the previous host though. That is okay though, it still will work.
I’ll be busy next week too. I can’t post much. The migration seems successful to me. If you see this message, do give a comment and say hello or something. 
Sincerely,
Mr. Dew