---
title: MediaTemple's Disappointing Grid
date: 2009-03-04T06:49:45+00:00
modified: 2010-04-23T02:30:38+00:00
permalink: https://kaspars.net/blog/mediatemple-disappointing-grid
post_type: post
author:
  name: Kaspars
  avatar: https://reverse.kaspars.net/gravatar/avatar/92bfcd3a8c3a21a033a6484d32c25a40b113ec6891f674336081513d5c98ef76?s=96&d=mm&r=g
category:
  - Development
  - Meta
  - WordPress
---

# MediaTemple’s Disappointing Grid

Since the very first day this website has been hosted at [MediaTemple](http://mediatemple.net). Back then it was a simple shared hosting account for a good price and a lot of good and well earned hype. Almost a year ago they started switching to a *grid infrastructure* which was said to be able to allocate enough computing power for every grid member no matter what the neighboring cells are doing.

The performance of their database server has been [worsening](https://kaspars.net/blog/wordpress/663-22-queries-1459-seconds/) ever since. Here are some facts from my own experience of using the [Grid Service (GS)](http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/features/) hosting package:

- Several times a week the **execution time for database queries is equal to the number of queries in seconds** (for example, 20 queries take 20 seconds). An average is around 2 seconds for 30 queries.
- When browsing through their testimonials I found a [WordPress based blog](http://www.glennwolsey.com/) for which it takes **9.5 seconds** to generate the index page (see at the end of `HTML` source). Another [WordPress powered blog](http://www.jonholato.com/2007/09/28/digg-and-reddit-no-match-for-media-temple/) listed in their testimonials mentions **14 queries, 12.539 seconds** in its source.
- According to [Pingdom](http://www.pingdom.com/) the uptime has been 99.45% (3h 40sec down) during the past month. But why does it take [4 seconds to load only the HTML](http://tools.pingdom.com/default.asp?url=https://kaspars.net/blog/)?

While the uptime is fair and good, the MySQL database performance is beyond acceptable. I have read that support inquiries regarding the database performance are usually returned with a suggestion to buy a [dedicated MySQL Container](http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/features/containers.php#mysql). **So I did** — in hopes that the problem lies in choosing the cheapest solution for such a complex engineering problem as web hosting. However, it is worth noting that a personal blog with 400 daily visitors may well be applicable for the cheapest of the *good* solutions.

Having used a dedicated MySQL container for two days, I can attest that the query times are still over 2 seconds, while the long peaks seem to be gone.

Here is their official [system incident blog](http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/) (which still uses WordPress 2.2.3). Having subscribed to its RSS feed ([view an HTML version](http://www.rss2html.com/public/rss2html.php?TEMPLATE=template-1-5-1.htm&XMLFILE=http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/feed "View an HTML version of MediaTemples server incident RSS feed")) it seems that not even two days pass without an incident of some sort. Although the outages may not have an impact on all *grid instances*, they still are a testament to the fact that problems arise more often then they should.

### The Solution

If the performance doesn’t improve by the end of March, I will leave MediaTemple for [Dreamhost](http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?456749), where I opened a hosting account with a dedicated MySQL server only to test if its really MediaTemple’s fault.

On Dreamhost it is *13 queries, 0.422 seconds*, which is *so* much better.