As you may know, I recently gave MediaTemple a piece of my mind and made the jump to Slicehost. To say the least, I am still incredibly impressed with Slicehost’s services and performance.

I always felt like the grid wasn’t performing as well as MediaTemple had promised. It was supposed to be a grid. It should have a ton of power, fast response times, superb uptime. Isn’t that what we should be able to expect? I would have even settled for good uptime. I put up with countless “scheduled maintenance” downtimes. I bit my tongue at database outages and many bursts of unresponsive port accesses. But, when my site was down for a few hours at a time, multiple weeks in a row, and I couldn’t get a single human response out of support, something just had to change.

I decided to switch to Slicehost. Since we are already using Slicehost for Scribbls, and have had excellent results, I decided it couldn’t hurt—plus, there are no contracts, so I really didn’t have much to lose.

I wouldn’t consider myself the type of person to normally get all excited about setting up a Ubuntu/Apache server, but I figured that I should at least learn. Slicehost provides a great deal of linux system setup and administration articles that are clear, easy to follow, and a great source of more knowledge than most simple setups will need.

I actually found that setup was pretty painless. I tracked my steps in a separate document along the way for reference later, and before I knew it, I was ready to port my site over.

The differences in performance just blows my mind. I’m on only a 256-slice (256MB Ram, 10GB storage, 100GB bandwidth), but my server load is nominal at all times, even during pretty decent traffic spikes. But even more amazing to me is the reports that I received from the Google Webmaster Tools about the time the Google Bot spent trying to download pages:

If this is any indicator, as you can see, prior to January 16th, MediaTemple’s performance was all over the board. It was taking nearly 3 seconds for Google to download a page, which means that those of us on slower connections were experiencing even worse performance. But suddenly, when I switched my site over, Google started averaging less than 700 milliseconds to completely download all pages.

Conclusion: MediaTemple Fail, Slicehost Win

Yep, Slicehost is definitely kicking the crap out of MediaTemple for customer service and offerings at comparable price points.

Thanks, Slicehost!

So I’ve been raving about Slicehost to everyone that I talk to lately. I’ve even started deploying sites for quite a few clients to instances at Slicehost. Afterall, who can really argue with these offerings?

• Fast response times
• Non-oversold machines
• Cost-effective daily backups and snapshots
• Excellent customer service by real people
• Full control of your own system

Well, the technical stuff might not be for every one, but it’s definitely working for me. And if you’re going to sign up, why not sign up using my referral?

Afterthoughts

Looking back on this post, I feel like I haven’t really expressed how angry I really was at MediaTemple. If you follow my Twitter feed (relevance: #1, #2, #3, #4), I think that you’ve received very close to the full effect. See also: Dear MediaTemple…