I posted about MediaTemple some time ago when Spudaroo was in development. I liked the company and the grid service and we launched Spudaroo on MediaTemple about a month ago. We found almost immediately that Spudaroo would slow to a mind numbing crawl or fail to load pages at all during the evening and contacted MediaTemple about this.

Support explained that this was due to other site activity on the Grid and if we purchased a MySQL container, this would resolve the issue. We did so and the improvement wasn’t enough to justify the service now costing the equivalent of RackSpace – so we switched over to RS.

Here is what we have found;

MediaTemple

• Incredibly easy to set up
• Very elegant and intuitive dashboard
• Excellent knowledgebase
• Top notch customer support
• Grid while cheap, isn’t consistent in speed nor uptime

RackSpace

• Difficult to setup
• Clunky and confusing dashboard
• Support available via Live Chat – brilliant!
• Support staff are knowledgeable but not as helpful as MT
• Managed cloud is consistent in speed and uptime

The two major drags with these firms are in MT’s case – performance and in RS’s case – quality of support. For example, we are experiencing the widely publicized ‘No suitable nodes are available to serve your request’ issue with RackSpace. If you Google ‘No suitable nodes are available to serve your request, RackSpace’ you will find 1200+ discussions on the subject from blogs of varying sizes – all WordPress.

I contacted RS today after getting a little fed up with not being able to post this update to the Spud blog due to the above issue. RS Support informed me that it wasn’t an issue so they didn’t have a resolution but if I had them call me, they would explain why it was happening. I replied that this hadn’t been an issue with the blog while it was hosted at MT, that an explanation wasn’t really going to help me or the hundreds of others including WebDevNews – ooops!

***Warning!***
Use caution when moving to Mosso or the Rackspace Cloud. Everything was great at first, but things went downhill quickly. We started having lots of “No suitable nodes are available to serve your request” errors, which relate to their MySQL servers. Please test thoroughly before using for anything important.

***Warning!***

Sheesh, I wonder what RS said to those guys!

At the end of the day everything is a work in progress. Helpful and friendly support goes a long way toward easing pain and inspiring tolerance, forgiveness (and loyalty) in customers when things don’t go so well – no matter the fault. If I could squash these two companies together into RackTemple – well life would be perfect but I can’t and performance must win out.

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