- Michael M.: Too much going on. Life in flux, etc..
- Sunshine: Wow, I was soooo happy to see a new post in my rss reader. I was hopping this is already the comeback! :(...
- gandalf: Did you only get caffeine through Dr.p or did you drink coffee as well? I’m interested, since...
- neeka: nine kilos… wow… :) happy holidays to you, michael, and to all your loved ones! veronica
- m: It was a bargain. No strings attached.
Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Maribor, Slovenia.
Portoroz, Slovenia.
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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.
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I hope you can get rid of the problem host, really soon. I hate having people mess with friends. I’ll be praying for you.
how much do you pay for MT monthly? if you have less then 20k unique visitors per day i recommend you servage.net
i’m satisfied with their service..
I am a low-bandwidth user and don’t run such fancy programming as carniola.org . Be that as it may, I am happy with my hosting at:
www.routhost.com/
They run Red Hat linux and the actual servers are in Texas. I am a “bronze” user, you might be in a higher bracket.
If you have less than 7 GB data transfer _per_day_, check out JaguarPC. I’m their user for the past few years and I can testify that their support works great.
I had a couple of problems with Servage, I must say.
Heartily recommend Dreamhost (dreamhost.com) or even Bluehost (bluehost.com) (where I’m hosted).
And for Dreamhost, I guess they still have a coupon available via Scrapetorrent. You should only go to Scrapetorrent, and sign up to Dreamhost via the link you find there or sth.
Good luck!
I already mailed you my recommendation for hosting, but if I were you I’d put a bill and a dead fish in an envelope and mail it back to (mt)
Well, by the photos they look like Ukranian arm dealers… so they must be used to such envelopes.
Hope you get this mess sorted out. In any case, help offer still up, if ever needed.
Hehe, keeping track… So far Pengovsky, Alcessa, Missnymphy, Grega.org, Bumec.org, The L files and Mvajda @ blogspot wrote about your issue or at least linked to it.
Actually it’s brumec.org, little miss sunshine
I’m sorry. It was a typo.
Will you forgive me? 
But Bumec sounds more interesting.
Add: Isoglossia, Had…
People really came through. I’m genuinely touched. (In an emotional way, not in a Pengovsky way)
And things are looking bright when it comes to new hosting. I should have more news soon.
A million thanks to everyone who linked to this. Your help shan’t be forgotten!
Micahel: They left an answer at Pengovsky’s blog? Seen that??
Yes, Alex posted a comment saying that he left a comment on this blog as well, but I can’t find it
Seems someone across the puddle received a late call
Linked as well.
Apparently MT lives up to its name: Empty promises, empty service, empty sensitivity, empty brains…
Mediatemple’s “10 reasons” linked above includes a link to a Google search. I did a quick search of the words “Mediatemple problems” (didn’t include the quotes in the search) and got almost 400,000 hits.
“Results 1 - 10 of about 399,000 for mediatemple problems. (0.03 seconds)”
www.bluehost.com/ is good and it offers 3000 gigs of transfer / month. I’m happy with their service and approach - they even helped me solve some WP issue, although this is ofcourse not their job.
Deeply recommended!
Well, it seems the campaign has reached its target. Head on over to Pengovsky’s site to see the reaction of Media Temple to his post about this ordeal…
Seems like mt is more afraid of Pengovsky than Michael. Maybe it would help if Michael mailed them to fix his problems or otherwise he’d send them Pengovsky
btw. on their “10 reasons page”, they have that “google us” link. I clicked it and:
result #3 reports about serious downtime
result #8 is someone with quite similar problems like Michael
Page 2 offers 2 more reachable and one no-more existant link to pages dealing with Problems regarding that grid server
Apologies to everyone. I did leave a comment here (I must have done the bad thing when I hit the button?) before I went over to pengovsky an posted. I also emailed Michael at his gmail address so we can start to correct what happened and I can find out where (mt) went wrong (several times it sounds like)…
hmm, interesting - I didn’t think, that even proposing to threaten someone with Peng. would be that scary.
Even more interesting, that it was necessary to make so much noise to provoke a reaction of (mt)…
anyway - really good computer systems allow to set a limit to the used CPU-time. If the customer wants more performance, he has to order it and then receives the bill. Not the other way round, that one gets billed and then it’s sink or swim.
Yeah, I’m a scary mo-fo… BOOO!
But seriously… On one hand I’m heartened by the fact that Alex took te time to post and (apparently) repost a comment, however, the fact that this happend to Michael M. adds gravity to the situation - at least in my view. I’m not happy until I see Mike posting again - either with a (mt) logo or (more likely) a different hosting provider.
I have no reason not to believe Alex that they’re trying to reach Michael, but it may be to little too late. It is, afterall, Michael’s call.
In related news: It seems that Blackberry service experienced a bad day as well
Hello again, I wanted to give everyone an update. I’ve already upgraded his account to start and, more importantly(!), I’m eagerly awaiting to hear back from Michael since this was a big customer service failure on our side (our CEO was not happy).
Pengovsky has been kind enough to let me chatter on his blog about it but I’ll also add that if Michael doesn’t want to stay with us, we understand. I wouldn’t expect people to stay if they received poor service, no information and no solutions from us.
Humble pie is being eaten, heads will roll, but when and where Michael will pop up again remains a mystery for now…
Welcome back!
Have I been censored??
Thank goodness its up and running again. I was beginning to fear a repeat of the Great Drought of 2006. Welcome back.
Maybe my last comment was premature. Where is everyone?
It seems Michael has been on and off for the last few days… But things seem to be getting back to normal
That’s really bad they treated you like that. I had a similar problem before but with me they over sold their bandwith so my small site went super slow. I now use www.220webhosting.co.uk a friend recommended them to me as I hadn’t heard of them before. They do seem to be “big players” but they give a personal service, I’ve been called twice in the year I’ve been with them to check everythings ok…real nice.
Whoops www.220webhosting.co.uk ***don’t seem to be “big players” but they give a personal service, I’ve been called twice in the year I’ve been with them to check everythings ok…real nice.
So what happened really and what is your response?