gantico.com/en

Not long ago I was tempted to abandon MT (Mediatemple) in favour of Site5 and actually I did it. Even if I had been happy with MediaTemple for about 4 years, I was concerned by the negative experience that a friend of mine had with them. Forums and blogs made me discover that some serious problems were appearing in their (GS) Grid Service Hosting.

In the meanwhile I was recommended to consider The Plan to End All Plans, from Site5.com. Unlimited sites, 750Gb of space and 7.5 TB of bandwidth, all for $7.50 per month. On the other side, the Grid Service plan was 100Gb of space and 1 TB of bandwidth for $20.00 per month.

Therefore I thought that I should have given a try and I opened a new account on Site5.com. Even if everything seemed to go smoothly, it was immediately clear that I was missing the handsome control panel from MT. I love simple interfaces and definitely I wasn’t falling in love with the BackStage + Site Admin from Site5.

Since I hadn’t close my old account on MT, I started making some tests and comparisons. I work a lot with video, so upload and download speed from server were the first things to test. It came right away noticeable that MT was quite faster in both. QuickTime videos were served by MT at least 1/3 times faster then Site5 (I tried from Fastweb ADSL connection in Italy). A few time later it became also known that all the problems in GS were solved.

The while I discovered that Site5 hadn’t registered the domain that I wanted to use with them: it might have been a fault of mine (I was in a hurry…), but probably their registration process wasn’t as clear and immediate as the one on MT. In other words, their super all-inclusive offer wasn’t including a domain registration!
I also had an unpleasant feeling with reviews like: “…in recent years Site5 has received criticism for overselling accounts with exaggerated features that customers cannot reach due to 25,000 file limit per account. Speed and uptime reliability has drastically decreased in recent years, particularly since partnering with The Planet.” (source: wikipedia.org)

I went immediately back with MT (now they are lovely hosting this page!) and with a few clicks I got a shining space with a couple of registered domain and several sub-domains. I was kind of sure that their great reputation couldn’t have been cancelled for a transitional period with some issues, and as a matter of facts they were all fixed. At the end they are the first ones offering a grid of servers: they can handle also heavy traffic peaks (I’m optimistic and I’m considering the chance to see my site on Digg-it or other social networks…). Besides ease of use and speed, I was reassured by their quick response to my support requests and by the return of positive comments in the blog sphere. Just to report one of them: MediaTemple: The last hosting plan you’ll ever need. I concluded that the extra money asked by MT was worth the effort for my needs.

Long uptime life to MediaTemple!

PS
to be quite honest and for completeness I add that:

• Site5 support was satisfactory even for closing my account and asking for the money back: they kept the promise of refunding without any question.
• I experienced minor issues with MediaTemple, like a down in Urchin (used for statistics), but always solved within 1 day.
• I’m going to link to MT for taking advantage of their referral program, but you can be pretty sure that I would have recommended it even without.