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…

Share your thoughts on “The Grid: Are You Getting What You’re Paying For?”.

I love Shape layers in Photoshop. They make editing and changing design comps a breeze. Resizing, re-coloring, everything—they help us be more efficient. But, when it comes to slicing the file up for the web, there is one thing that I hate: when people don't use “Snap to Pixels” with their shapes. Let me help you not make me really annoyed.

Share your thoughts on “Photoshop Tip: Snap Shapes to Pixels”.

It’s been just a half of a week since I relaunched Paul Armstrong Designs; I’m happy to say that it has received quite a warm reception amongst the webernet crowd. I guess that all of those late-nights that I spent working on it will pay off.

Share your thoughts on “Post v6 Relaunch Updates”.

The Web is evolving, and with all of the transitions in my personal and professional life in the last year, I feel like my site fell behind during the version 5 run. There were actually two iterations of v5: v5.0 and v5.7. Yeah… I skipped around a bit.

Share your thoughts on “Site Relaunch: Awesoming the Internet Into v6”.

Downtime when a client is trying to reference my site is completely unacceptable. Downtime in the middle of the working day is completely unacceptable. Even scheduled downtime for upgrades as often as you have it is still unacceptable. More than a four-hour response time for support requests is unacceptable.

Share your thoughts on “Dear MediaTemple”.