Earlier this month, I had been suffering from extremely unstable service from (mt) MediaTemple; this caused quite considerable downtime. In fact, it was so bad that some of my hosted websites became unusable for 2 DAYS! I understand that hosts have problems from time to time, but 2 days!? This is just totally unacceptable, and so I decided to pack my bags and look for a more reliable host.

I had Linode (aff), a Virtual Private Server (VPS) host, in my bookmarks for quite a while; just in case I decided to move host in the future. A ‘Linode 360′ provides 360MB of RAM, 16 GB of storage and 200 GB of data transfer for a mere $19.95 per month. {(mt) MediaTemple offer ‘more’, but you are unlikely to get anywhere near using it without overaging on ‘GPUs’ or database usage; I was eventually forced to buy a MySQL container, and my sites receive very little traffic at all.}

I found the decision of web host a difficult choice to make. I ended up choosing a VPS (it was out of Slicehost and Linode) just to give it a go. And now, I don’t think I’ll ever go back. VPS has its disadvantages (like taking ages to set-up), granted; but the power and flexibility of it is something I couldn’t help but get exited about. With VPS, you don’t get stupid rules like ’5 cron jobs per account’; in fact, you can pretty much do whatever you like.

Take a look at a Pingdom report for Taxomation. Day four was when it moved over to Linode. 2 hours of downtime that day was due to the (mt) MediaTemple hosting, and the downtime on consecutive days due to problems I inflicted on the Linode account. (Maybe I should have got everything working before I migrated, no? .) With (mt) MediaTemple, page loads were typically taking 0.85s. With Linode, that time has been almost halved to 0.46s.

If you are looking for a new web host and know enough about web server software, why not give Linode a go? I’m sure you will not regret it! You can get there using my wonderful affiliate link (Why not?) or with this non-affiliate link.

Bye, bye MediaTemple!

Please share you web hosting experiences…