Adieu, Media Temple

The year was 2006 when I signed up for Media Temple hosting. I must have been 17, no older than 18 years old.

When I was 13 or so I turned our family computer into a web host. At the time, I was unable to go through traditional means of securing a web host since I was a minor and had no credit card to put on file. None of the hosting companies had a “pay by mail” option. HA! I read up on what I needed to do, and before you knew it I had the Windows XP turned into a powerhost! I was also too young to purchase a domain. I ended up obtaining several free subdomains. TLD’s (top level domain) were again, only paid by bank card, and I didn’t have that tool in my financial arsenal yet. It wouldn’t be until I was 16 that I opened up a checking account.

My first experience as my own host was complete naivety. I had in the back of my head that I was probably exposing our family computer to hackers. I didn’t do anything special to the setup. Thankfully there was nothing sensitive on it (at least I didn’t think so!). I hosted the array of sites that I maintained which were mostly sites of hobbies I did or things I liked or was a fan of. I enjoyed creating graphics, making tutorials, and posting them online. I used our computer to host all of this.

The amazing host that I created out of the family computer quickly died at night though. My Dad had a habit of unplugging the DSL modem in the evening and taking it with him to bed to prevent me from staying up late and doing the following:

1. playing multiplayer games: command and conquer!
2. lurking and partaking in forum discussions
3. evil chat rooms?!
4. working on my latest “web design”

Fast forward three years and I’m working a job, have a checking account, etc. I signed up for some host (who I don’t recall the name) in Europe that was way cheap. This was when they counted bandwidth and put caps on your traffic. It all seemed very…limited. But it was affordable for me and my $6.00/hr job at Panera Bread. I jumped jobs 2 months later to work at 7-Eleven at $8.00/hour. Wahoo, big raise for me in those days. If you’re wondering, yes, I was robbed– multiple times.

Finally in 2006, my senior year of high school, I made the “jump” to Media Temple. All the cool kids were using MT! All the design people recommended them, and I wanted to be in the “in” crowd, you know? It wasn’t too much more expensive than my European host, so I signed up. All was well for many years… I went through an upgrade somewhere in the middle.

Not long after I graduated high school, probably 8 months later, I landed my first web design position in the real working world, thanks to my roommate, Derek. Since the start of my career I had always recommended Media Temple hosting: reliable, safe, easy to use and reputable. In 2010, service seemed to be below par. Maintenance seemed to be prevalent, more so than usual, and in 2011, there were several outages during the days that I could no longer safely tell prospective and current clients that Media Temple was a good choice for their business. I had lost trust in them. In the beginning of 2012 it was more or less the same, with minor improvement.

In once instance, I had a client who was on a dedicated virtual server and it was snail slow. There wasn’t anything running on it, no processes at all, and it was the big mystery of all time to me. I had lost so much trust in them, that in 2012 when I started Gobble Logic with my partner Matt Wild, we went with Liquid Web based on a recommendation from our friend Kevin. I migrated all the crucial sites over and left some remnants on Media Temple for a whole year. It was only a few hours ago that I completed the last of the migration.

While I’m a bit sad at the parting, I’m saluting you, Media Temple. It’s been a (mostly) wonderful 7 whole years of service with you. Who knows, you may regain my trust again one day. Until then, Adieu.