[webfuel]

I like how there is no option for shared hosting.

I did a php app for a client on Media Temple's (gs) and it was unbearably slow. The php execution time would vary drastically (.1 seconds to over a minute) even on a simple debugging page. After a lot of back and forth with customer service and never being able to pinpoint the issue, I switch to Linode.

Screenshot of a page taking 1.4 minutes to render: http://i.imgur.com/e310W.png

Same page on Linode: http://i.imgur.com/OTN9l.png

[tlack]

I wonder if this is a general Media Temple thing. I have a few small sites using Drupal on MT and the response times vary widely. I thought it was because of Drupal itself (I never use it; client decision) but maybe it's just MT, which I've found to be basically horrible overall.

[MTmattL]

Sorry to hear about your bad experience so far. This would usually be the case due to different configurations between the sites, but if they are all the same uniform configuration we'd be happy to take a look for you. Please let me know if you have a support request open already. Finally, what in particular have you found horrible, and what would you like to see us fix the most?

[kingofspain]

I've noticed the same. Did a lot of agency work last year where the agency boss got every client on MT to get the affiliate perks and was getting constant grief over slow sites, slow scripts and whatnot. I stuck copies of everything onto an old Dreamhost account I had and it flew.

In my experiences over 6-7 mo, MT had these speed issues roughly 50% of the time.

[billpatrianakos]

I thought about having a shared host option but honestly, shared hosting is kind of a joke if you're running any sort of custom app. It can be reasonably assumed that most shared hosting is used for static sites and PHP blogs.

I'll also add that I keep a MediaTemple gs account in addition to my VPSes for various static sites. You can actually use it to host your DNS and email then have your site resolve to the ip of another server. Obviously that's a really expensive option for basic email but if you've got the account for some other reason like me then you've got 100 domains you can add for free so it's an option in rare cases. Anyway, I'm in the middle of building a PHP app for a client on their MediaTemple gs account and I'll testify to the fact that performance varies wildly. I haven't seem anything take over a minute to execute but I've seen it go from .1 to as high as 50-something seconds. I've found you can fix most of the long queries by writing more efficient code. You'll still get some wild variations but not as often.