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Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Media Temple is recommended by many as a web hosting and cloud service provider, a company that currently offers four types of hosting services.
- Grid - Shared Hosting
- Managed WordPress Hosting
- Linux VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Server
- Media Temple has long been one of the most popular web hosting brands among developers and professional bloggers, and currently has over 125,000 users and hosts over 1.5 million domains. We have been following them for more than 1 year in order to understand their services in detail, and the following reviews are based on our real-world experience.
- Media Temple was sold to GoDaddy in 2013 and for those development professionals looking for web hosting, we recommend using Kinsta or SiteGround, or if price is your primary consideration, then check out Hostinger.
About Media Temple
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As mentioned above, Media Temple offers a wide range of web hosting services, and for first-time users, the wide range of options can feel a bit confusing, especially when Media Temple uses various short forms to name their hosting plans. So, before we dive into the content of this article, let's take a look at what Media Temple has to offer.
- Shared Hosting (shared hosting)
- Cluster-based shared hosting in Linux environments
- Optimized for WordPress with 20GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth
- Set up to 1000 email accounts and 100 online sites per account
- Price: $20/month
- Self-Managed VPS and Managed VPS
For VPS hosting, Media Temple users can choose between self-managed and fully-managed models. Self-managed VPS is usually cheaper, but you have to build everything from scratch using the command line; fully managed VPS costs more, but you get an easy-to-use Plesk or cPanel control panel for an intuitive way to build websites.
- Entry-level server configuration with 2GB of RAM, 30GB of storage and 2TB of traffic
- Self-managed VPS starts at $30/month; fully managed at $55/month
- 99.999% uptime guarantee
- Self-managed VPS provides full SSH and root access
- Fully managed VPS offers a variety of one-click installation features and an easy-to-use Plesks control panel
- Dedicated Server (dedicated host)
As with the VPS hosting plan, users can choose between a self-managed and fully managed environment, with a price difference of $500/month. Here are some of the main parameters of the server.
- Exclusive use of one physical server
- Hosted unlimited domains with 10TB of traffic per month
- Multi-core Intel Xeon processor, 128GB RAM, 1TB SSD hard drive
- Write cache supported by battery and flash memory
Experience Media Temple
Our experience with Media Temple so far has been very positive and we are impressed with the speed of customer service response. Not only is live chat customer service immediately available to answer questions, but their Twitter staff is also very active and tweets containing @mediatemple are responded to within hours.
Benefits of Media Temple
Here are the main benefits you can get at Media Temple.
- Excellent customer service
Media Temple offers 24/7 support via phone, email, live chat and Twitter. We have been in contact with customer service several times and have been satisfied.
- CloudTech Advanced Support
You can pay extra to be pampered by advanced support staff, certified engineers who will analyze your website code, install complex applications for you, back up and restore all your data, and clean up hacks in your account.
- Powerful performance servers
Media Temple scored 84/100 on Pingdom, faster than most of its competitors, and here are some examples of what we checked using Pingdom's site speed testing tool.
Virtual Hosting
Performance Score
Number of requests
Loading time
Page Size
Download speed
Media Temple
84
11
430ms
480.9KB
1118KB/S
Web Hosting Hub
83
25
716ms
508.5KB
328KB/S
HostGator
77
31
984ms
721.7KB
546.7KB/S
- Ready to cope with traffic peaks
Media Temple's servers are highly scalable, with network bandwidth and database systems scaling as network traffic increases.
- Extremely valuable additional services
Media Temple offers a number of rare (but convenient) upgrades for users who need additional performance, such as
- MySQL GridContainer, a Scalable MySQL Environment for Guaranteed Performance
- CloudFlare with RailGun for additional site security
Disadvantages of Media Temple
However, there are two minor problems with Media Temple.
- One-click installation only supports a limited number of applications
Shared hosting users can only install three applications - WordPress, Drupal and Zen Cart - with one click; other applications (such as Joomla and osCommerce) must be installed manually. However, fully managed VPS users can install over 200 applications with the one-click install feature.
- less than perfect uptime
Over the past year, we tested an average uptime of 99.98%, which seems good, but considering that this is a $20/month web host, a score of more than 99.99% is only reasonable.
Customer Feedback
Over the past few months, we contacted over 40 web developers and bloggers. The results were surprising, with Media Temple being one of the most recommended brand names out of thousands of web hosting companies.
Feedback from David.
I am absolutely happy with my current web host. Media Temple has been there when I needed them.
For example, a WordPress plugin used by my blog was exploited and caused problems on my virtual server. I was in Brazil at the time, so I was unable to call them. I tweeted them and they had a new machine ready for me in no time. They were a major lifesaver and they've always jumped to help any time I needed it.
Feedback from Jeff Starr.
Yes, I am very happy with Media Temple. Moving around from host to host over the course of my 10+ years online, I've found Media Temple to provide affordable, awesome hosting and excellent customer service.
It was around 2009 and I had been hosted at "A Small Orange" (on a shared server) for a couple of years. The servers were inconsistent and the support staff (with an exception or two) was pretty horrible, so I finally got fed up and decided to find something better. After much research I finally chose Media Temple because of their reported 1) consistency/uptime, 2) excellent customer service, 3) not too crazy expensive pricing. So at that time I stepped up from mediocre shared hosting to Media Temple's VPS (dv) hosting.
I've been happy ever since.
Summary
For developers and bloggers who need extra stability and scalability, Media Temple is definitely one of the best options out there. However, for those new to website building, or more budget conscious, there are many cheaper options, such as Hostinger and SiteGround, which we really like.
- Established: 1998
- Minimum price: $20.00/month
- Uptime: 99.98%
- Page load time: 430 milliseconds
- Hosting plans: web hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, dedicated servers
- Customer support: live chat, email, phone, knowledge base
- Control backend: Plesk
- Payment method.
- Money back guarantee: 30 days