About two years ago I decided I would test out Media Temple's grid service package, mainly because it was highly recommended by WordPress users, and seemed to perform quite well. In fact, for the first few weeks I was a Grid Service user, I thought things ran actually pretty smoothly. Unfortunately though, over the next few months, things would degrade rather rapidly. My site was plagued by ever increasing latency, and would often go down for 4- 6 hours at a time due to MySQL outages or random, seemingly unannounced maintenance periods. It got so bad at one point that I actually came to the conclusion ...

For those of you who actually come to my site from time to time, you'll have undoubtedly noticed my little counter in the right corner of the sidebar. What that tracks is how long my website has been active in the corner of my living room. If you're on a paid hosting account, fire me off an email whenever your server goes down so I can keep track against how mine's doing. So far I'm at 17 days straight without any downtime. If you check out Media Temple's status blog, you can see that they've had 50 minutes of outage during the last three days. Based on their own blog entries, they are running ...

Yes, sports fans, it's been twelve days since I decided to move my hosting back onto my living room floor. So far, it's been 12 days of pure bliss, of heavenly visions filled with bunny rabbits and endless fields of sunshine and happiness, where kids run forever. But seriously, things have been going rather great. I haven't had a single hiccup, and get complete SQL backups emailed to me twice a day, just in case something were to ever go wrong. All my data is backed up with RAID 5 storage (and will email me whenever a drive starts to get old, thanks to hourly SMART diagnostics), so unless my apartment ...

So I'm not one to gloat, especially considering I recommended Media Temple to a few friends. But Media Temple just went down again, two days after I moved my blog back to a server in my house. Thankfully, my Linux box is chugging along nicely, and I didn't experience an outage. Rebecca was Twittering how lame it was that web hosting companies struggle to keep a simple blog up, and I totally understand her frustration. It's one thing to pay $6 a month for hosting and have the odd outage, but it's another when you're paying $20 a month and expecting three to five nines worth of service. Media Temple ...

After setting up my RAID 5 array last night, I decided that maybe I would take a stab at self hosting my blog again. Up until two years ago, I had always run my blog from home. It's not really that hard to set up your own Apache server, and Linux can literally run for months or more without requiring a reboot. The downside of course is that home internet connections can be flaky, and most co-locations and hosting companies have UPS backup when things go wrong. I recently upgraded my home fiber internet connection to a small business plan, so my internet connection at home is actually fairly insane ...

Big thanks to all of you who pinged me about helping with my little web experiment. So far we have six hosts represented, but I'd love to have a lot more. So if you have any friends that have blogs and can help out, please direct them to me. I'm collecting data in real time right now, so it will be interesting to see what it'll all look like after a few days. When this is done, we should all have a pretty intimate insight into all the various hosting companies out there and how they compare to each other during normal wear and tear. The teaser is over for now! Stay tuned, in a few days I'll post ...

As some of you know, last year I went from having my blog hosted on GoDaddy to using shared hosting services over at HostMonster (and before that, I went from having a Linux box on the floor of my bedroom to GoDaddy). Shared hosting is a fairly cheap way to set up a website, and you can usually get away with it for less than $10/mo. For the most part, I was pretty happy with HostMonster shared hosting, although in these last few months their databases kept falling over, and I had intermittent connection problems. To their credit though, they always answered the phone and fixed everything in a ...