Leaving Media Temple to speed up WordPress
A little while back I wrote about how to speed up WordPress to improve rankings. Some of the comments I received pointed to the fact that the problems may lie with my Grid Service hosting plan, provided by Media Temple. I got in touch with the company who replied with the following:
Since the (gs) Grid-Service is a shared hosting environment, the issues that you are experiencing may simply be the ”bad neighbor” effect. I recommend trying a MySQL GridContainer as it would move your databases out of the shared environment (a.k.a. SmartPool) and you would no longer be susceptible to the bad neighbor effect. You would also have access to additional troubleshooting tools. Additionally, if you choose to cancel the GridContainer, when you are moved back into the SmartPool, you will be moved into a different one, with the potential to have fewer ”bad neighbors”.
Now, to me at least, this suggests that Media Temple’s Grid Service ($20.00/month) simply isn’t up to hosting a WordPress based site. If it was, why would I need to implement a MySQL GridContainer costing a further £20/month? To be fair to Media Temple, they offered me a month’s free trial of the MySQL Container Pro which I took them up on. The speed of the site did improve, albeit not remarkably.
I also posted on the excellent Web Hosting Talk forum about the issue and the community seemed pretty sure what was causing the issue – Media Temple. A few people posted saying they had experienced similar issues with their sites hosted by Media Temple. One guy was even more scathing:
Performance-wise, it’s most likely related to MT’s horrid (and I say that as someone who has used them frequently, and helped users migrate from them) database performance.
Ouch! So, for the sake of this site’s performance, I’ve decided to throw in the towel with Media Temple. The site will be relaunched in the next couple of days with a new domain (MancunianRepublik.com) and critically, a new host. I’ve decided to keep it local and have my site hosted by Manchester based 34sp.com. It’s early days but the signals are good. Emails have been replied to within minutes. At the time of writing, Media Temple’s estimated response time to support requests is 20 hours! In terms of cost, if I was to continue with Media Temple, I would be paying $40/month for a sluggish site with support responses which take an age. I’m paying 34sp.com the equivalent of just $5/month. No contest surely?
I really hope MediaTemple get things sorted as they seem like genuinely good people and I like what they’re trying to. Shame I won’t be around to see it.
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About Brendan - I'm a SEO based in Manchester, currently employed by the good folks at Confetti Celebrations.
I've been working in SEO for over 5 years now and occasionally dabble in the odd bit of eMarketing. I've spoken on SEO and eMarketing at Universities throughout north west England.
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Yep, you won’t be sorry. I still have a handful of sites that don’t use databases on MediaTemple (cs), and they run great, even under extremely heavy load. But I moved all my WordPress sites off of MT a while back and saw immediate massive speed improvement. It really was a very noticeable speed gain, instantly.
That’s great news Donna. I’m really excited about having a hosting package that will let me get the most out of WordPress and to experiment with some SEO techniques without page load time being a negative factor.
Out of interest, who did you move your WordPress sites to?
I just came across your post today after wondering if I should come back to Media Temple after a year off their servers. My website was running incredibly slow on (mt) for a couple of years and I tried everything short of buying a grid container. I decided I was fed up and moved to HostGator and noticed triple the speed increase.
Today I thought about going back to (mt) because I have always loved how easy it is to manage all my accounts and settings in their control panel. They even added CloudFlare to help speed up websites.
Alas, I was disappointed again when I tested the load times of a WP site on (mt) and compared it to mine on HostGator. My site loaded in 4.7 seconds while the one on (mt) took a staggering 18 seconds.
I highly recommend that people do not use Media Temple for any WordPress sites. It is going to be a miserable experience. I have gone round and round with (mt) for years and not one thing has changed to make WordPress better for their grid customers.
Hi Chris,
Yep, I’m totally with you. I REALLY wanted to stay with Media Temple for the same reasons. Their interface is very slick and it’s very easy to control everything from one place. Their inability to get WordPress working on GridService is gob smacking. I was left with no choice.