Site will be down tonight due to Media Temple scheduled maintenance

My Host, Media Temple, has informed me that they’re doing scheduled (major) maintenance tonight on their Grid-Service. The site may be down from 9:00pm to 1:00am PDT, and possibly longer.

MAINTENANCE ACTION: (mt) Engineers will be making significant changes to the back-end network used for the (gs) Grid-Service. This maintenance will improve reliability and assist in the speed of resolving network related incidents.

Sounds great! I don’t like the site going down, but if it means improving the Grid I’m willing to live with it. Apparently Cluster.01 and Cluster.02 are getting the most attention. That’s good news since I’m on Cluster.01.

Is Media Temple a Good Host, or have I just been saying that for so long I’ve convinced myself it’s still true?

I’ve been hosting my sites on Media Temple for almost 5 years now. In general I’ve been happy with them, and I’ve recommended them to friends and clients. But, with my recent troubles with the GridContainer, I started to wonder if they’re still as good as they once were, or if they gradually went downhill and I just hadn’t realized it.

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Media Temple GridContainer Woes

My sites are hosted by Media Temple. Generally I’ve been pretty happy with them, but the last few days have been a giant pain in the ass.

On Monday I migrated my Grid Service account from the MySQL SmartPool, to the dedicated MySQL GridContainer. One is a shared version of MySQL server, and the other is a dedicated version with double the resources. In theory, the GridContainer is supposed to be “better” than the SmartPool, as you’re not competing for resources with neighboring sites. But so far that hasn’t exactly been the case.

Even though my site has been running fine under the SmartPool, from the moment I migrated to the GridContainer the MySQL server has been crashing every 8-10 hours. You may have noticed the site keeps going up and down. Media Temple can offer no explanation for this.

I’m still trying to troubleshoot, and things seem a little more stable now, but so far I’m not terribly impressed. I may opt to go back into the SmartPool. I’ll be writing up some thoughts on this whole thing once I get through it.

Until this is resolved, I’m waiting to publish new posts, as I’ve already had to roll the database back once.

Update: I cancelled the Grid-Container. Read more, here.