Media Temple’s (gs) Grid-Server implementation

Posted by Daniel Stout on Tue 21 Nov 2006 at 10:26 PM

We’re hosted with (mt) Media Temple, and have had various web sites on their servers for the past year (or nearly so). We’ve been really pleased with (mt)’s service and rock solid stability. We had a (ss) Shared-Server account them, which provided very high reliability and speed. Recently we found out that Media Temple has a new, next generation service meant to replace the Shared-Server system. It’s called (gs) Grid-Server, and it’s based on some fundamentally different principles than the traditional web hosting account.

Typically with shared hosting, the web host will put x number of web sites on a particular server. If certain web sites outgrow the needs of that box, they get moved to a less crowded box. But you’re tied one-to-one with a particular server.

With (mt) Media Temple’s new Grid-Server, a “grid” of servers will serve up your website. All of the servers in the grid have access to your website and can serve it up. As demand comes for certain sites, more resources are doled out to meet the demand. There is an ebb and flow.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that has been already tested in high end clusters, which spread processing over a multitude of servers rather than one particular server. This makes a lot of sense in my computer science-trained brain, and I’m sure good things will come of this implementation of (gs) Grid-Server.

Media Temple has spent a year and implemented their own scheme for this. Perhaps because of this there were a few initial glitches with the system — especially with MySQL connectivity and Urchin webstats not working — but Media Temple seems to have resolved the remaining issues, and we’ve seen nothing but glorious amounts of uptime here at Manufactured Environments.

We’re pleased with the speed of the new service — pages are served up quickly, and we’re glad that we opted-in early for this new service. Apparently (mt) is phasing out the old (ss) Shared-Server system completely.

Now that Media Temple is in their new Class 4 data center, we’re happy to enter a new era with (mt) Media Temple as our web host of choice, and we can highly recommend them to others.

Tags: (mt) · grid-server · media temple · shared-server · urchin · web hosting · web hosts

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