Transitioning from MediaTemple to Linode

If you've been following my Twitter account, you've undoubtedly noticed my complaints regarding MediaTemple.

I've been a customer of MediaTemple (MT) for several years now, hosting over a dozen domains there. I've been hosting all of these domains on their shared host plan (gs), which runs $20 a month. For about two years, I was also using their VPS (ve) plan in parallel for hosting my NeoInvoice project (which had more requirements than a shared host could provide) for $30 a month.

I never had a problem with MT's VPS server (save for me occasionally nuking my server on accident). However, their shared host kept giving me issues. About once a month all of my hosts would go down for several hours at a time. Sometimes the issue would be that their MySQL database was dead, allowing static content to survive. Other times one of the other accounts would get too popular and all requests to my site would throw 500 errors.

I did the math, and I was only getting 97-98% uptime.

When I noticed my sites were having issues, I would go into their admin panel to check on system outages, and there would be no mention of the problem. This whole SLA and inaccurate status information really left a bad taste in my mouth.

There was also the growing pain of me doing a lot more Node.js development, something which can't run on shared hosting. Really, to run a Node.js app, you're going to need either a VPS, dedicated, or a cloud provider. I wanted a single location to host a bunch of PHP/MySQL websites as well as my Node.js/MongoDB apps, and not being afraid to get my hands dirty I leaned towards a VPS (not to mention most cloud's don't support websockets).

I'm now in the process of moving everything over to a Linode 512MB VPS for $20 a month. I had heard the name before (I'm sure you have too) and after someone on Twitter recommended it I started doing more research. The admin panel is awesome, a lot better than what MT had to offer.

I haven't moved all of my domains there yet. I'm still figuring out the best way to handle DNS, VHOSTs, etc (the price of forgoing a cloud or shared host). I cannot attest to the quality of Linode yet either, we'll see after my sites have been hosted for a few months.

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.