System Status Ambiguity
I keep getting comments on this site and Twitter messages about sites being completely down or in various states of disarray. Some customers complain that Media Temple has not called them on the phone or explained anything. Sites being down this long is insane and the status page does not really clarify things:
Media Temple should definitely communicate better with these users. All that is gained from the Status Incident Page is that sites are being moved at a very slow pace. Media Temple should answer these questions to the customers who are still experiencing problems:
What does this mean?
Why were some sites back online yesterday and others still offline right now?
Why is it taking so long?
What is this thing about the Fiji Agent? Can I perform migration on my own to speed things up?
Was the multiple phone calls I got due to my loud complaints on this blog and Twitter? I don’t know. For me 8 hours of downtime, 20 hrs of Account Center lockout and intermittent email/ftp errors which translated into 1yr of free hosting seemed fair… It’s like beta testing their new architecture… as a web developer free hosting to play with is something I would always agree to even if it’s unstable (which I hope the new Cluster will be)
My personal sites and projects I plan keep on this Media Temple (gs) account. Why would I trust them at this stage? Primarily because an account I have on the newer Gen 2 architecture on Cluster 4 hasn’t experienced any serious downtime and I’m led to believe my migrated Cluster 2 sites will be fine from now on out.
My clients who squawked the loudest I will be moving to a different ISP. I have a responsibility to them and if they would feel safer that way, I will oblige.
For people whose sites are still down and losing Alexa rankings, traffic, ad revenue, and clients- that really sucks. I don’t know what can be done for them. This is my attempt to help, as a small web developer I understand your frustration. Please leave suggestions here, perhaps your voices will be more unified than on Twitter. Media Temple does seem read all the comments and posts on this blog very quickly.
Media Temple Customers 
I believe that domains registered though media temple can only point toward the media temple nameservers.
MT customers check via:
login to Account Center > Domains > Edit Zone File
So even if you mirrored your content (db/ftp files) on a backup server, you cannot change the nameserver to point to that backup.
.. so you are forced to wait the outages out.
MT, please allow people to change the nameserver fields in the zone file? And while we are on the topic, perhaps add private registration as well?
And if its not that simple, please tell us why?
Aaron
May 6, 2009 at 10:34 pm
I can not believe that my website is one of the 400 that remain to be completed of be moved !!!
csantiba
May 7, 2009 at 1:03 am
UNREAL! What, do they have like one overworked guy popping floppies in and restoring the sites one at a time by hand?
Regardless of any upcoming improvements on the horizon, the handling of these massive outages should be cause for ditching MT. I can’t even count the hours anymore I lost track.
And I can’t believe the comment above about not being able to edit the nameserver for a domain you own – that’s just insult to injury.
Jackson
May 7, 2009 at 12:05 pm
My client’s sites have been restored, but with old backups from the end of March.
For dynamic sites this is awful news.
Also problems with permissions on restored files.
Jackson
May 7, 2009 at 2:30 pm
After two years I have to say I’m done with Mediatemple. They did have a great service which seemed to degrade after awhile. From backups options being down, GPU section down from time to time, overall response time on the site was slow and my site loaded slowly over time. Trust me I tried every single trick in the book and tested every plugin and the site still loaded slow over time and now with this downtime to where my site was fully down for 2 days and now on old backups from months ago and still slow which basically makes the site down for a total of 4 days (and counting) the straw finally broke the camels back.
I remember two months ago I when this happened the first time I asked to be moved to a different Cluster since Cluster 2 has been problematic (which is not something new for this cluster been going on for a least 1.5 years now) they told me they couldn’t and that I have to repurchase a new account and transfer the data over. But now they are moving my site to a different cluster due to the latest disaster which just tells me they could have did it before.
I can have this type of downtime and about to host another 3 sites for clients coming up soon. I already have moved on to another Grid hosting and awaiting for the file merge to happen so I can get my most current data and move on. I can’t risk something like this happening again especially to new sites that I will be launching soon. The DR plan they have for this is just ridiculous and that ultimately broke my Trust in MediaTemple.
bookworm316
May 7, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I also didn’t mention the loss of Ad Revenue and page rank due to this as well. I just can’t trust when something like this happens again that MediaTemple has the proper plan in place to fix the issue quickly and efficiently.
bookworm316
May 7, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I’m done, too, but it looks like I’ll keep the year free service to mess with. My site on the new server loads at least twice as fast, if not three times, and the price is one third of MT.
I wonder how much money they lost this time? If they lost $100,000 for a months redemption, would that mean that 1.2 million was lost this time?
Biff
May 18, 2009 at 9:03 pm
I’ve already moved over to GoDaddy and much happier now. Its faster and my installations work much better than they did before. I will just cancel with them. No amount of free hosting will re-gain my trust with them.
bookworm316
May 18, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Hopeless. Clients wanna sue me for not resolving their issues, and still no update from media temple.
Pathetic service. 2 times in one months. I’m done with these guys.
Mithun
July 28, 2010 at 7:21 am
Terribly sorry to hear of your troubles. I’ve finally had it with Media Temples crappy grid service. I’m in the process of migrating to a new company as I write this.
brennannovak
July 28, 2010 at 9:39 pm