Archives for April 17th, 2007

Don’t believe some of the gushing things you read about Media Temple: they just fleeced the hell out of me and treated me like a jerk for the whole ride.

Here’s the story, morning glory: They’ve been my host for two years now and during that time I’ve never had reason to complain. They occasionally had some downtime but it was never bad enough to make me want to leave. If you look closely, you can even find their logo at the bottom of this page. I was especially happy with their enormous bandwidth limits because I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about “too much traffic” or any other such nonsense. I was wrong.

Last week I got a whopping bill for some mysterious “GPU overage” — something I hadn’t even heard of until recently. I had no idea what hit me but assumed that we could work something out. I guess I was expecting them to be interested in solving the problem, or doing something other than say: “Yeah, and?”

But they weren’t. What they were interested in was treating me like some unwashed leprous asshole with SuperAIDS. When I tried figuring out what the problem was, their technical support guessed that it “could be some Wordpress misconfiguration.” When I called them up and asked them if there was any way to slam the brakes on the (currently-still-ticking) meter, they curtly said no. I had been punk’d.

Searching around online, I then found out that, like John Lennon: I’m not the only one. Media Temple apparently makes a nice little business out of doing this. (To give you an idea of how much: My total GPU overage fee is nearly 25% more than an entire year’s worth of hosting. Awesome, huh?)

A call to their billing department was equally hostile. For a company that regularly flouts how much fun they are, they all seemed to be monosyllabic cranks. When I told them I would probably have to end my service, the guy indifferently told me to “go do it online.” Not that I would expect him to cry or anything, but I expected at least some effort to convince me to stay.

A case in point: I remember a few years ago I had a problem with Amazon. It was partly my fault and partly theirs but they sent me an e-mail apologizing and offered to make things right. I’ve been deeply loyal to them ever since.

Media Temple, on the other hand, has something more akin to Iron-Curtain-era customer service. The fact that they seem to enjoy sending big-ass surprise bills to customers means that they’re not the right service for me. Or for anyone who doesn’t like nasty surprises for that matter.

So in the coming days I’ll be scrambling to find a new and decent host; let me say thanks to everyone so far who’s offered some help or advice to that end, and apologies to everyone for this whole mess.

If everything goes well, I’ll be able to scratch off the red MT logo by the end of this month.