Do you have a set of websites that you want to host on one platform without the extra hassle of organizing each of them?
If so, grid hosting is the best solution for your case – and our Media Temple review goes a long way to show why this specific platform works wonders for the job.
This company counts itself among the big names when it comes to web hosting services, as they serve more than 100,000 members around the world and hosts 1.5 million websites.
The aim, after all, is helping web designers, developers, innovators and digital entrepreneurs, and gives them a proper online space to bring their ideas to life.
Read on our review to find out if this web hosting space is the best fit for you.
Founded in 1998 and headquartered in California, the company has grown steadily over the years to become one of the top names in web hosting as well as cloud packaging.
However, this is not their main standout feature – that honor goes to their unique website management system known as a ‘Grid’.
This is a system of clustering servers in a certain arrangement, and is meant to boost both uptime and speed, particularly for shared hosting.
In addition, it also helps in easier scalability and setup time, which is very important to ensure your site takes off. Their client base is quite expansive, and even incorporates famous brands, such as Toyota, Samsung, CBS, Adidas, and Starbucks.
In 2013, the company was acquired by GoDaddy, which is another web hosting company, and their resulting packages package plenty of web developers and professionals.
The company provide almost each & every features that you need to host and manage your website. Here we will discuss some of their features.
1. Management and control panels
The control panel you will use is either WHM/cPanel or Plesk.
The other benefits that will come with all packages include the security scanning and performance boosts from the platform, including automated backups that keep your data secure and your website up-to-date.
If you happen to be interested in VPS hosting packages, but are not interested in the intensive system administration that is needed, the company has a VPS plan that is fully managed by them, which allows them to manage all aspects of your account on your behalf.
At the end of the day, this is a good alternative for a company that will usually opt to employ someone or a team to look after their servers.
2. WordPress hosting
WordPress itself has come a long way – from its beginnings as a purely blogging platform, it is now a CMS (Content Management System).
Because of the popularity it has, web hosting providers are increasingly offering hosting services for people that want to run a WordPress-based site.
Regardless of the plan you select, you will get the SiteLock website security tool, unlimited email accounts, and automatic cloud backups.
If automatic WordPress updates are a major issue for you, the good news is that you can get them on Media Temple’s WordPress plans, and your site will load quickly as well thanks to the cache. In addition, all plans will support WP-CLI (Command Line Interface), as well as SSH access.
The SSH accessibility is quite interesting when it comes to WordPress plans in general, because many web hosting providers will only allow WordPress users to maintain their blogs through the control panel on the hosting website.
The SSL certificate is a must when building a proper website, since newer versions of Chrome and other browsers are marking sites that have HTTP as insecure, and you will need to upgrade them to HTTPS.
If you assume that you can get away with using an existing certificate, this is sadly incorrect – you must generate a certificate on the Media Temple’s WordPress hosting panel.
At the end of the day, this will add additional expenses to your hosting bill, so you might want to reconsider choosing this platform if WordPress hosting is very essential to you.
There is plenty of access to G Suite, which is Google’s suite of web applications, which include:
Google forms
Gmail
Google docs (alternative to Free Office)
Google Drive
Google Sites (for site building)
Google Hangouts
It is possible to get these things for free, but it is important to get a professional email that fits in with your email address.
Can’t you buy these from Google?
The platform itself states that you can access G suite from their control panel, once you buy their other offerings.
This makes them attractive if you are considering operating a virtual business, since it allows you to host your website and connect all your employees on the same site.
4. Cancellation policy and money-back guarantee
It is possible to receive a full refund within 30 days of buying a subscription. However, this will only apply for hosting packages, and will exclude any additional products, such as service add-ons or domain names.
In other cases, you can receive a pro-rated refund when you cancel a 12-month plan before the set period ends.
Keep in mind though, that the company provides a 2-month free service package when you sign on for 12 months, so the discount will disappear when you cancel your subscription before the period ends, and they will calculate your refund accordingly.
5. Dedicated servers
Compared to VPS hosting, the Media Temple review shows VPS is actually a better option because it gives the advantages of dedicated servers without the dedicated server, when you think about it.
Hardware servers require you to wire things up and install the software and OS – if you happen to buy more servers than you require, you will be stuck with it until the contract time ends.
Regardless of that, the pricing rates are quite competitive, although they are much more costly compared to VPS – the rates will increase, depending on the server you choose to go for. They aim to take care of the following, as you take care of the rest:
Installation and management of cPanel
Network
Hardware
Hardening of servers
Regarding the Operating System, you have a CentOS or Linux, similar to what you would get on their VPS plans. Dedicated servers can work for you if you have money to spend and require or want a server that allows you to ‘set it and forget’, like you would for an infomercial product.
6. Installation of scripts
The installation of scripts is quite easy, thanks to the use of the one-click installation tool known as Softaculous, which allows you to extend the feature set and functionality of your website.
This will also allow for installation of web apps such as Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Contact form, Magento, and Forums.
If automatic WordPress updates are a major issue for you, the good news is that you can get them on Media Temple’s plans, and your site will load quickly as well thanks to the cache.
In addition, all plans will support WP-CLI (Command Line Interface), as well as SSH access.
The SSH accessibility is quite interesting when it comes to WordPress plans in general, because many web hosting providers will only allow WordPress users to maintain their blogs through the control panel on the hosting website.
Despite all these advantages WordPress plans on the platform have, do take note that they do not have a money-back guarantee from Media Temple. However they offer 30 days money back guarantee on limited products.
The only exception is when you are using a one-click install version on a cloud server.
The SSL certificate is a must when building a proper website, since newer versions of Chrome and other browsers are marking sites that have HTTP as insecure, and you will need to upgrade them to HTTPS.
7. CDN
Also known as Content Delivery Networks, they are among the easiest methods you can use when you want to speed up your website and increase the likelihood of traffic, so this makes it very important. Fortunately, they are not too difficult to set up.
The platform uses Cloudflare, which then offers the CDN that you can use on any website. However, it takes a different approach to what you would expect from other web hosts: while others integrate Cloudflare with their plans, Media Temple does not do the same thing.
Because of this, you will need to sign up with Cloudflare first, then integrate it to your account on Media Temple. This is not a difficult process though, since Media Temple has a useful document that guides you through the process.
8. Good Security
At Media Temple you will get awesome security services to protect your website from hackers.
9. Uptime guarantees
One thing about the company’s infrastructure is the rare 99.999% uptime guarantee that it offers – but this only applies to dedicated hosting, as well as certain VPS plans.
Let’s get into the details.
Month & Year
Server Uptime
Server Response Time
Result
February 2020
99.99%
612 ms
Excellent
January 2020
100%
745 ms
Excellent
December 2019
99.98%
625 ms
Excellent
November 2019
99.99%
598 ms
Excellent
October 2019
99.99%
634 ms
Excellent
September 2019
99.90%
723 ms
Good
August 2019
99.99%
645 ms
Excellent
July 2019
100%
687 ms
Excellent
June 2019
99.99%
810 ms
Excellent
May 2019
99.98%
716 ms
Excellent
April 2019
100%
656 ms
Excellent
March 2019
99.85%
618 ms
Ok
They also have a refund system in place to take care of times when you have downtime. If your downtime is more than 20 minutes, then you can request the support team to give you a 20% credit on your monthly fee, with a maximum of 100% of your bill.
You will then need to leave them to verify the downtime, and then manually lodge a claim within 5 days of making your first report.
Other products will not have their uptime guarantees specified. And off peak hours always use Pacific Standard Time as their basis.
While the grid infrastructure makes the downtimes less frequent, the team states that server maintenance is always done during these ‘off peak’ hours.
The company offers its customers support on a 24/7 basis, 365 days a year. You can reach them through live chat and support tickets, as well as phone or Twitter.
However, do note that the phone option only gives a US-based phone number, and there are no local contacts to cater for users from other countries.
In addition, the company has a knowledgebase, as well as a community forum that can increase self-help.
If you want to pay for extra assistance through subscription though, you can choose to buy one-off support assistance, or buy a premium support package known as CloudTech.
5 Media Temple Drawbacks, Cons or Disadvantages
Media Temple is responsible for the invention of a unique architecture of servers that is named “the grid.”
This was designed to try and improve performance and speeds for shared hosting and seems to work by all accounts.
On top of that, it was also designed to allow for easy upscaling, which falls in line with the company supporting entrepreneurs and digital creators. With all that innovation on display, where does Media Temple fall short?
1. Premium Prices
As you might expect with this kind of technology being utilized, Media Temple is a premium hosting provider.
This means that the prices you encounter are going to be bigger than usual, and while it may be worth it, be careful, you don’t end up spending more than you can afford.
2. No cPanel
Media Temple seems to pride itself on its own technology, and as such, uses its own dashboard instead of the industry-standard cPanel.
Not only that, but the result is that you have to pay for website migration, which is annoying.
Admitidly, if you want to use the Media Temple service to begin with, then you likely aren’t going to have too much of a problem with this, but given the pricing structure of the company, free migration would have been appreciated.
3. No Free Extras
Really driving the premium service message home is the fact that the basic plan tends to be pretty barebones when it comes to features.
While it’s fundamentally solid, you have to pay for any extra individual elements you may want. To its credit, the site doesn’t try to deceive you with this pricing model, but it’s there all the same.
4. You Have to Pay for a One to One Consultation
This one is a bit of a doozie. If you want a one to one with an expert to try and get your site set up, you’re going to have to fork over some cash.
Given the already expensive nature of the site, this can be a bit bothersome, especially when it doesn’t use cPanel.
5. It Can Be Hard to Get the Hang of The Dashboard
Following on from the last point, Media Temple doesn’t use cPanel, meaning you need to get used to a new control panel all over again.
This can be tricky, and having to pay for consultations doesn’t help that.
The solutions that are offered here are a wide spread of Linux-based hosting on an offer basis, ranging from enterprise Amazon Web Services (AWS) to website builders and many more.
While the plans from the company are not exactly the cheapest you will get, there is plenty of value for money you will get from the service.
The added cost will manifest through the very good levels of customer support, with the employees helping out about 90% of the time helping their clients.
It is possible to find plenty of information regarding their advanced services from their website, although we have included a brief summary of the plans available. These are:
Shared hosting
Website builder hosting
Managed WordPress hosting
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud hosting
Free hosting
Entry level services
1. Shared hosting
The feature of shared hosting has a different name on this platform – Grid hosting. This structure will essentially point to a cloud infrastructure.
There are 3 plans to expect from the shared hosting package. The packages will depend on your database connections, the number of sites to build, the maximum bandwidth your account will handle, and the storage you will get.
On the other hand, the premium offerings will have important extras like security tools and content delivery networks (CDNs).
These will begin at $20 per month, and will have features that you will not get in a typical entry level hosting plan.
These include solid drive state (SSD) storage, scalability (to allow the site to remain online even during traffic surges), and protection against DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks and intrusion.
They come with 30 managed apps as well, such as Drupal and WordPress.
Note that you will not get a Plesk or cPanel features with the plan, but you will have a control panel that was built by in-house engineers of the company, so it will be great for your needs.
This means that the company will handle some of the maintenance that your site needs in order to operate smoothly, rather than leaving you to do all the work.
The package includes the following benefits:
Unlimited customer services and customer support on a 24/7 basis
Optimizations for your website
Security monitoring
Backups that are worth 30 days of data
Updates of the WordPress core
Additional benefits that come with the package include:
Customizable themes
Two staging environments (instead of one as with many platforms)
Many developer tools such as SFTP, Git (to help in version control), phpMyAdmin, SSH, and WP-CLI
Website Builder hosting
The company partners with Virb, which is a provider of services for site building, which has partnered with other website hosting platforms such as Squarespace, Shopify, and Wix.
Thanks to this partnership, it is possible to build an unlimited number of pages, link custom domains, host your site on the cloud, and build using a number of professional, mobile friendly themes as your basis.
Free hosting
The company fortunately has free trials for their new customers, but you should be aware of two things:
Migrating from one package to another is a hassle
The free trial is great, but there are numerous limitations
Advanced hosting
There are a variety of hosting options that you can choose, just in case you have outgrown the entry-level options.
One of these is their partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Media Temple handling all the complexities of AWS hosting facilities. This will allow non-geek customers to enjoy the benefits of this hosting without struggling with technicalities.
A short comparison of the three packages in advanced hosting are:
Package
Resources
Security
Speed
Pricing
VPS hosting
Shared
Moderate
Fast
Moderate
Cloud hosting
Shared
Low
Fast
Cheap
Dedicated server
Private
High
Very fast
Expensive
3. VPS hosting
If you choose to go for the VPS hosting, you have a choice between unmanaged and managed options, which you can select according to your preferences.
The VPS option that is self-managed is more in tune with users that have a high familiarity with Linux, as well as its command line.
It will provide you with a choice of operating system (CentOS, Debian or Ubuntu), the ability to instantly scale your account if necessary, and full root access.
On the other hand, managed hosting is more for people that are advanced or intermediate users. You will not be relegated to command-line-only access, but you will still need to be comfortable using a GUI-based control panel.
4. Dedicated servers
If you are looking for a package that gives you the best options in terms of space, power and speed, then our Media Temple review shows that you should select their dedicated servers.
They will also allow you to get an entire server to yourself, which adds an extra aspect of security.
Similar to a variety of offerings available on the site, it is possible to select from a wide array of management and customization options.
These include a fully managed plan where they take care of everything for you, all the way to a bare metal server (they only give you the physical infrastructure, then leave you to set up everything else on your own).
When it comes to performance and uptime, the choice you make will not necessarily affect the space. All options will come with:
Storage of 1 TB
RAM of 128 GB
99% uptime
Monthly bandwidth allowance of 10 TB
SSD storage of 1 TB
Selection of software that is pre-installed
4. Cloud hosting
If you happen to have some interest in getting cloud-based hosting services, our Media Temple review reveals that the company offers a selection of plans, though all sites are managed using the infrastructure from Amazon Web Services.
All these options are optimized and fully managed for your website. At every step of your project to set up the site, you will receive assistance from the support team to activate your site and keep it running smoothly.
Some Quick Aspects on the Pricing
Instead of using bandwidth as a basis for placing the pricing limits, we notice in this Media Temple review that the company prices your fee based on visitor count and storage space.
This is quite similar to the approach of managed WordPress competitors such as WP Engine.
There are bonuses that come for more advanced plans, such as SSL certificates, malware protection, and G Suite logins.
The use of an SSL certificate is essential to ensuring your website’s security, and ensures all its data is safe. It is even more important if you are planning on using your website to sell items, whether they are digital or physical items.
Here is a summary on their popular hosting plans and what to expect in terms of pricing:
At the end of our Media Temple review, we find out that this web hosting platform is among the best ones to use, and their acquisition by GoDaddy proves them to be quite reliable.
They do have plenty of hosting options to cover any purposes, and even their cheapest plans have quite impressive features.
However, their money-back guarantee clauses are quite complicated, and some of the cheaper plans lack an uptime guarantee, which is quite disappointing.
Regardless of that though, the company is well known for their high quality service, and the support options are many – especially if you live in the US. It will also give you plenty of room to get your site off the ground.
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