MediaTemple
Fever, A Self-Hosted Feed Reader, Heats Up Your RSS Subscriptions
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by Dan Romero on June 24, 2009

Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.

Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.”

The other refreshing feature of the app is its move away from email inbox-style unread counts. As a long-time Google Reader user, I always dreaded the experience of returning from an offline vacation only to find several thousand unread items in my reader. With Fever, the emphasis is on dividing subscriptions into two camps: must-reads (called Kindling) and everything else (Sparks). By moving the “hit-or-miss” feeds into the Sparks bin, Fever ensures that a user gets only the most relevant content.

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MediaTemple Reboots Impressive Virb Social Network, Launches A Venture Fund
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by Jason Kincaid on February 18, 2009

Virb, a social network that melds some of the customization options seen on MySpace with a mature and media-heavy atmosphere, has just launched a completely overhauled version of its service. The new site sports a very attractive new interface, reworked backend, and new social features that make it an impressive upgrade to the original, which launched in 2007. In conjunction with Virb’s reintroduction, hosting provider MediaTemple has annouced that it has set up a new venture platform called (mt) Ventures, which acquired Virb last summer and has also acquired and invested in several other projects.

Virb originally launched its social network in 2007 as something of an experiment, and has since grown to a user base of around 250,000 users, including many musicians who use the site to share their music and find fans. But its developers say that they weren’t quite ready to keep up with the site’s growth, nor could they adapt quickly enough to encourage new waves of users. So rather than try to tweak the codebase they’d created, the Virb team decided to start anew, and have spent the last 18 months rebuilding their social network into something much more robust than its previous incarnation.

Rather than try to replace the dominant players in the social network space, the Virb team acknowledges that most people have already established online presences at other social networks like MySpace and Facebook. They explain that Virb is meant to help fill the gap left by these other networks, and is meant as enhancement – not a replacement – to those networks users may already belong to.

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Media Temple Crushes Shared Hosting
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by Michael Arrington on October 17, 2006

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.

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