Leaving Mediatemple for Dreamhost
So I’m really pissed with Mediatemple.
Not only it’s not the fastest dog on the block, especially the backend, they consistently kept shutting down Noobkit 5-8 times a day.
Mediatemple allocates 64MB of RAM for a Mongrel instance, which is fine. If your app goes over, they just shut Mongrel down, automatically… without restarting it. So I’m getting an SMS from Pingdom at 3AM telling me that the site is down and I have to go “cap restart” it.
Noobkit is a very small site currently and only been up and running for just over 10 days with barely 200 uniques a day. There’s absolutely no way Mongrel can tip over 64MB with this type of load. I tried running a production Mogrel locally and pound it with Apache’s AB. After 10,000 hits I’m seeing 45MB of RAM.
Response from Mediatemple to my question about frequent Mongrel shutdowns was as expected:
After reviewing our records, I was able to confirm that it has been shutting down repeatedly. However, testing it live versus on another system will not necessarily be an accurate estimate. You will either need to debug your application, or increase your container to another a larger server.
So yesterday I found a no-registration coupon and got myself an account at DreamHost. Moving the blog was a peace of cake. Setting up Capistrano was pretty easy as well and the DNS should be updated overnight.
At first, DreamHost seems much snappier. We’ll see how it works out.
One comments so far...
I’m doing the same thing. I’ve had an (mt) account for two years now. I’ve had a Dreamhost account (running only one low-traffic site) for about a year. This past week, (mt) decided to automatically upgrade my MySQL container, and add $20/mo. to my hosting fees, claiming that one of my sites carries too much DB traffic. So, before that happens, I’m jumping ship.
We’ll see how things go with Dreamhost. My main site (wheatdesign.com) is the last to move over. But I’ve already moved over several others (the biggest being bassplaying.com, a Drupal-powered site) and they seem to be running fine on DH, for a third of what it would have cost to keep them on (mt).
I’m also looking forward to running some Ruby apps, as that’s something I couldn’t do with my “grid server lite” account.
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