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Putting All My Eggs Into One Basket May 14, 2007

Posted by Lucanos in : webserver , 3 comments

But, better one secure basket than 3 insecure ones!
Well, I have taken the leap of faith - I have finally decided to start consolidating alot of my internet real estate into a single, or at least as few as possible, providers.

The motivation for this was from a number of sources, and for a number of reasons:

  1. Stability
    Precision-Media.com, whom I had been using for a few months experienced some rather large service interruptions within a short period. I have only held an account with them for around about 2 months, but in that time they have only achieved an uptime around the 85% mark, which is not acceptable for critical sites.
    MWS Media, whom I have had an account with for some time, recently started experiencing a few hiccups in their uptime as well - nowhere near as bad as Precision-Media.com, but notable all the same.
  2. Security
    Precision-Media.com also experienced a hacking attack, which contributed to their downtime. The hacker managed to access their management account and deleted all the content of their customers’ accounts. This is especially concerning as it was not communicated to us, their customers, until I contacted them to enquire about the extended downtime, and I am not 100% sure that my billing details were not compromised (I am watching my Visa bill very closely…)
  3. Support
    Whilst both MWS Media and Precision-Media.com responded to most of my emails rather promptly, their performance from a support perspective left a bit to be desired. MWS Media do not even provide a trouble-ticketing system, which they say is due to their efforts to try and keep the costs down (we’ll get to that later), and Precision-Media.com acknowledged a trouble-ticket requesting that the PHP GD Library be invoked on their new server, but took a considerable amount of time to action that request.
  4. Flexibility
    Whilst both MWS Media and Precision-Media.com provide the facility to host as many subdomains as you like, they are limiting in that you can only associate a single domain to each account. So if I owned “domain.net” and “domain.com”, I would have to maintain two accounts to be able to use these domains and any subdomains.
  5. Cost/Capacity
    Whilst I must admit that the Precision-Media.com package, offering US$10 a year for Unlimited Storage and Unlimited Bandwidth is incredible, you can have all the capacity in the world, but if you have no way to access that capacity due to downtimes, or if you lose any content you upload due to hackers tearing the server apart, it’s useless.
    MWS Media’s offering of 2Gb of Storage and 10Gb/mth of Bandwidth for US$50 a year is also good, it does show some limitations if you are planning on using the hosting page to hold content in the 10’s of Gbs.
  6. Management
    Having to keep a number of different hosts all updated simultaneously was quite a drag on my time.

So, what have I done?
I managed to secure a package with (mt) MediaTemple, which offers 100Gb of Storage, 1,000Gb/mth of Bandwidth and up to 100 Domains/Subdomains. In addition, it allows me to manipulate the DNS Zones for any hosted domains, allowing me to spread some of my subdomains out onto other servers as required. Admittedly, it is US$240 a year, but when you look at the number of accounts that would equate to from other providers, and the fact that the GridServer package I have is supposed to offer 100% uptime through the use of redundant mirrored resources, it is worth it.
The end result?

MediaTemple is now my Primary Webhosting Provider - It houses my critical sites, as well as sites where the content is considered irreplaceable. I still have the hosting packages from Precision-Media.net, who I use to house my more bandwidth intense tools, as this way I am making the most of that “Unlimited” part of the deal.

In addition to rationalising my hosting, I also looked at my domain registration providers. MWS Media, again, was one of hy registrars, providing .NET and .COM addresses for US$18 a year. Compare that to my GoDaddy account, which offers yearly registrations for around US$8.95 (give or take, dependant on deals) and the choice was simple. So I am not in the process of transferring 6 domains over to GoDaddy, at the price of US$6.95 for the .COMs and US$5.00 for the .NETs, when you consider that the transfer fee also includes an additional 1 year extension on all affected domains, this is a great deal.

The short, short, version:

Is there anything I would change about MediaTemple? Yeah, of course there is…