Media Temple launched a major new hosting service this morning called Grid Server. It matches low end shared hosting services in pricing ($20/month) but promises to grow along with the site, manage huge short term traffic spikes without a disruption in service or performance and avoid the “bad neighbor” problem common with shared hosting services. The basic $20 package includes 100 GB of storage, 1 TB of bandwidth and up to 100 individual sites.
I spoke to the Grid Server team yesterday. The podcast of the conversation is up at TalkCrunch.
Media Temple’s Grid-Server is a completely new hosting platform that replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. We’ve eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email. The Grid’s on-demand scalability means you’ll always be ready for intense bursts of traffic; and the growing audience resulting from your online success. All of this power, controlled through our brand new AccountCenter, is available today for a price point unmatched by any competing service.
Customer sites are not hosted on a single (dedicated, shared or virtual) machine. Instead, they are managed by hundreds of clustered servers, and Media Temple monitors the health of the entire grid as well as individual sites. If a site spikes in traffic, performance is unaffected and the site owner will simple be charged for overage on bandwidth and CPU usage. If the grid begins to get stressed, Media Temple simply adds more machines.
Overage pricing hasn’t been put up on the site at the time of writing this post (and it’s important of course), although the company says that the basic package specs compare very favorably with low end dedicated server hosting at $200/month.
They’ve also added a number of other features to make hosting setup and maintenance as easy as possible for the novice, including one-click setup of Wordpress, Drupal, Gallery, ZenCart and other applications.
Mosso (part of Rackspace) is an existing competing service that is comparable to much of what Media Temple is doing with Grid Server; however, Mosso starts at 5x the price, $100/month. The basic Mosso package offers slightly less storage and twice the bandwidth offered by Grid Server.
Grid Server can also be compared to Amazon’s new EC2 utility computing service, which we discussed in the podcast. The Media Temple team was quick to point out that EC2 isn’t really designed to deal with permanent virtual server configurations, and lacks customer service and the auto burst capabilities of Grid Server.
As a disclosure, we use Media Temple for some of our hosting (we have a couple of dedicated servers with them). Frankly Grid Server may be a better choice for us. We have a ton of excess capacity to handle traffic spikes, which we pay for whether or not we use.
Media Temple: Hey, Mike.. mention our new product on TechCrunch and we’ll give you a sweet deal off your hosting!
Mike: Ok.
Excellent!!! They have some great DV server plans with very reasonable price tags. And, they allow root access. Could this be the answer to my server woes? Let’s see . . .
I was looking at their packages yesterday and thinking it was a good deal but now they “crushed” it..T_T
…but 20$/m for those features is not that bad.
One thing I’d question is if there are too many sites going with their own ips, will that make IPv6 come sooner?
That’s a pretty neat deal. Ruby too. As you mentioned, it sounds a bit like what Amazon were offering but more reliable/robust.
The TalkCrunch podcast is not up. Where is it?
yeah, been a longtime MT customer and love them, been waiting for this upgrade for quite a while (includes mysql upgrades and flexible php upgrades and tons of ruby support and other enhancements, including mail etc..)
just clicked my migrate button, should all happen (knock on wood) without problems within about 10 to 24 hours (says 24, but my actual estimate was under 10…hmm)
This would be a great service if it were possible to actually also have root access..
Although i don’t see how this would be possible
Michael, the link to TalkCrunch gives a 404 Error. I am thinking either TalkCrunch experiences some problems or it is banned here, in Ukraine.
Engine Yard does this for Rails and offers a pretty robust backend as well. Seems like a couple of other hosting companies are offering similar packages now as well.
Oh great. Crush EC2. I will order 100 of them today.
Nothing special with this, there are probably hundreds of other Zero Downtime / Clustered Web Hosting services available from other companies and starting at lower prices (Some at 7$ per month) with better specs.
hm, I had lots of problems with media temple and had to change my host. + clustered web hosting doesnt seem to be such a big innovation….
thanks for you mentioned mosso, it’s features are great too.
I like the #1 comment by Rob…
I have been looking for a new host. MediaTemple looks like the place to be. A Clustered platform for $20 a month, swithch between php4 and 5, ROR, now that’s hot!
interesting.
I remember this company was the first to offer flash video hosting (commercial), it was the first movers in that area.
well , it looks that didn’t fly , it seems they stopped it.
I wonder what was their reaction after seeing what Youtube did?
This is Google cached version of their page :
http://72.14.20...t=clnk&cd=1
You can see , they started that 2001 , before any one heard or seen streamed flash videos.
Is that really FULL disclosure? You just host some servers there? Or they give you free/deeply-discounted servers and support, w/ a grid package waiting in the future?
I’ll take the opportunity to plug eApps, then: http://www.eapps.com. Very cheap, lots of features, great uptime. I haven’t had any problems with them since I signed on a couple of years back.
Darn…. now am really thorn btwn my dedicated server and this … can someone tell me if they allow root access?
Sounds like an awesome deal… alas there goes shared hosting ..
#22: As somebody who used to be in the hosting game, I can actually say that what MT is doing is interesting and unusual (especially at the price point they’re selling it at). In my defense, I’m currently hosted with Dreamhost and I have no financial (or otherwise) interest in plugging MT. I’m certain that some other hosting operations may run in a grid, but I’m also sure they’d do it at a higher pricepoint, and without the slick control panel. Most hosting (especially shared hosting) is not provided as a grid — your content is served off of a single managed server, perhaps connected to a shared NAS. This is a completely different architecture than MT describes they have.
#18: Does he really need to provide full disclosure? Is Techcrunch a public company? Maybe there are Securities laws I’m not aware of. I suppose it’s your perrogative to be bothered by this article, but I don’t see anything wrong with it. So it’s a hosting / services review. What else is new on this site?
#23 Pungu, there is no root access. If you need root access, you should continue the hunt for a dedicated server or vps. As mentioned in the podcast related to this post, something like EC2 might be what you need.
There is nothing wrong with him plugging a service he uses. There is nothing wrong with (mt) getting a client to plug them.
Do any of you have portfolios and references attached to them? Same thing. Do you disclose on your websites that your clients hooked you up with Baseball tickets in exchange for designing a Restaurant menu for free once?
Cmon people. Lighten up.
26: I thought there was root access for their DV plans?????
27: I agree with you 100%. So much hate going on around here. I’ve said it b4 and will say it again: NO ONE FORCED YOU TO VISIT THIS BLOG!
How is this web two point oh?
How is this innovative?
How is $20/month a low end?
#28: There is root access on the DV plans. I think Michael was responding for the grid plans.
Perhaps some perspective to be injected:
WHAT exactly does one consider to be the Ideal host?
Personally, the Grid is long overdue. The price at $20 per month is incredible. I have personal preference for CPanel, others I know prefer Plesk -looks MT has done their homework in creating their own -time will tell. Static IP for a $1 month? (if I got that right) …whats NOT right here? My only reseveration is their overall location in L.A. being not the most stable place on the planet. I was hoping for arizona or something…would suck to have the greatest hosting in the world taken out by THE earthquake. (no freaking out, you know this already) Currently I’m hosted very near the Sears Tower in Chicago so already I’m asking for it. I want hosting that isnt going to be suseptable to disasters…. Then again, maybe I should LIVE in a place that…thats enough. -=
^ I don’t know. I’m in the business to make money. I know most people are so this kind of stuff doesn’t bother me. I am actually more offended when somebody is dumb about it – like thousands of celebrities on myspace who should be setting up their own blog/websites, putting links on their myspace pages because the users will click, and then monetizing them and building their brand – versus giving myspace all the revenue and marrying their future online presence to that platform.
I am interested in this hosting site because most of those I’ve worked with have been terrible for some reason or another (either the interface was bad, the prices high, terrible tech support, etc.).
1 TB of bandwidth for $20/month…?
Give this company the over-sellers of the year award. I’d like to see what happens when someone tries to use 1TB of bandwidth….
I have been in contact with Media Temple over the last week and it looks like they will soon add Django support to Grid Server.
“After doing some research Django will not run properly with our (gs) Grid-Server. We will be creating a container to handle Django in the near future.”
The innovation people are missing here in the utility style pay for what you use model that this new system provides. They’re calling it GPU… It’s one of the first mass market hosting plans to offer this kind of utility style computing. That’s what’s cool here everything else has been done before to varying degrees.
#30 We have plenty of people already capitalizing on this on our older plans. The long and short of it is, if you don’t go over your resources, you’re not even on the radar.
Uh, who cares about clustered web server? The real bottleneck is almost always the database and I don’t think they will cluster that easily.
- It’s actually a good deal, not the best, but a good deal compared to the norm.
- Does anyone use amazon ec2 or dreamhost.com? If so, how is it overall.
- Does anyone use serverbeach.com? If so, how is it overall.
- Patricia, you have a very good point as far as the building the marketing band, but most of these celebrities have no clue how to setup it up. No need to pound them for their lack of techy as we lack the acting, or do we, that was rhetorical Patricia, because if we did know how to act, we would all be Movie Stars living in mansions sipping starbucks.
Anyways, I see you setting up your own pr company, called presscelebs or son, helping them setup host and taking part of their profits in return to helping them build their brand.
- Patricia, I am not in this business to make money, I am in this business to make a difference …
There’s nothing wrong with plugging a service that you personally use, especially when (mt) is offering something that seems to be way ahead of what all the other web hosts are offering (at least for shared hosting and the price).
I’ve been a (mt) customer for 2 years now and before today I thought they offered exceptional web hosting…….but with grid server, they’ve taken it to a whole new level.
I’m currently migrating my websites over to grid server from shared server as we speak, I can’t wait to test drive it.
Great news!
I’ve been a MT customer for quite some time now. Excellent service always, just like they’re saying…
I just started the migration but I still have a few questions
-When our plans expire do we renew at the $7.95/month?
-How much load can it handle before we have you pay more? It would suck to get dugg and have to pay extra.
-Would this be a good solution for podcasts, almost like cachefly except not local?
-Any idea on overage costs?
This gives an idea… http://www.malu...ing-oversellers
Terminology clarification – “1 TB of “short-path” bandwidth” & “GPUs”
Their site has some info on GPUs but what exactly is “short-path” BW. Does the subscriber really get to use 1TB of transfer…in/out??
To those who think Mike is getting money for posting this:
Mike sells sponsorships on TechCrunch for $10,000/month apiece, plus all of the other advertising around the site. Do you really think $200 a month worth of free hosting is enough to turn him into to a shill? Even in light of his stated complaints about paying for unused server overhead?
Grid is a legitimate thing to write about, especially for this audience. I’m sure many readers here could benefit from it. I’m mainly a Dreamhost guy myself and only use MediaTemple for mail so I’m definitely not biased in their favor, but this is a tech product people — and possibly a good one — so it deserves to be written about.
Is there something similar to this or a good hosting solution for ASP.Net and MS SQL?
Is this hosting only for applications using the LAMP ( Linux,Apache,Mysql,PHP) stack or are there options for .NET based
hosting as well.
well i don’t think this company does .Net
@ john doe – it’s a good point, but my mom doesn’t know how to set up her site either for her new little company – she asked me, now she’s about to launch. but i get what you’re saying – good point.
for the record, i would make a terrible actress.
The $20/ month for shared hosting is a good deal- however, the $15/ year domain registration fee isn’t. In fact, this could be rather prohibitive for folks who host large numbers of domains!
The storage is between 4 and 18 GB and NOT 100 GB as stated in this post!
Rich: You don’t have to have your domain with them, you can use any provider.
Well this comes just about in time. I am planning to set up (rebrand actually) my own services/offerings and disk space is crucial for us. Maybe Mike can give me some (free) publicity when we’re done. We have some ambitious plans which includes new techlogies and data center/infrastructure provisioning. I will anyways register at Techcrunch when we’re done.
Or do you just do US (palo alto et al) area only?
Tarry
http://tarrysin...tblogspotdotcom
streamcast: You are referencing the current (dv) product line. The (gs) is 100GB.