I’ve been with my host MediaTemple for going-on 3 years now, but recently the service has really fallen off the boat. It started around a month ago when some of the conditions I’m accustomed to using to post to this blog started disappearing. Yeah, disappearing. First was the inability to automatically resize my uploaded images.

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I used to have the ability to have thumbs, create medium, large and full size images; now I’m restricted to full size, so I have to manually resize all of my images to format for this blog. That’s a pain. I guess they thought whatever PHP library was running that script was too much load for their servers.

Now, today, I go to upload over 30 images at once (all resized) and I want to use the WordPress gallery function to load all of them at once into the post. To my amazement the ‘Gallery’ link built-in to WordPress is missing. (see highlight below)

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the highlighted area which is standard after uploading images from within WordPress is missing as of this morning.

So my media upload window only has ‘From Computer’, ‘From URL’ and ‘Media Library’ and I’d have to click into Media Library and insert each image one at a time.

Done.

I’m done with MediaTemple.

I’ve noticed intermittent drops on and off for the past 3 months and this is the deal breaker. I haven’t said anything to date because frankly it’s not worth the effort getting on the phone with tech support and waiting 30 minutes to have someone quote me some Terms & Conditions clause. I’m using their cheapest hosting plan, the Grid Service (gs) which I understand is clustered and therefore someone else may be ruining it for all of us, but WordPress is an extremely popular and light software and if its basic functions cant run on your cheapest plan then something is wrong. I get an average of 300-400 unique visitors a day so I know my load isn’t off the charts. It’s manageable. Their front-end and back-end are polished and extremely slick which lures customers in, but their affordable plan is henceforth bogus. If you can’t afford the Dedicated Virtual (starting at $50/month) or Nitro ($750/month) plan then you’re boned.

Note to self here’s what I need to do sometime soon:

  1. Back up all website content, databases, and emails from your current host.
  2. Upload files and import your databases to your new hosting service and re-create any email accounts.
  3. Update database connection strings and system paths to match the environment.
  4. Test the site.
  5. Switch Name Servers.
  6. Verify that your visitors are successfully seeing your site on your new server.
geekathon