It’s been 2 whole weeks since I’ve had my Media Temple grid service hosting account and so far I’m loving it. Although I did have a few problems with my Urchin stats from the start of my service (500 error page), a (mt) technical assistant was able to have the issue sorted out within 24hrs of when I sent out an email to them which is quicker than my other hosting provider (not naming names) has responded to emails.

The control panel is intuitive, well layed out, easy to navigate and beatiful. They have a great designer or team of designers at media temple. The only down side I’ve found with the account centre is that it can be very slow, I mean annoyingly slow reminiscent of the days of dial up. Well, maybe I’m exagerating a little there but it could seriously do with a little boost.

The one touch install is just brilliant, saves you a lot of time and effort configuring files especially for users who don’t have the knowledge to manually install the relevant sites or blogs offered but would like to use them.

Being a web developer, it also gives me a lot of control over what I can do with the websites I build. It doesn’t give you as much control as you’ld have with a dedicated server but you definately get a lot for the money you pay and for most people, it definately gives you more control than you can shake a stick at. I’m eagerley anticipating the launch of the (cs) Cluster-Server in Q4 of 2008(any day now) which will be the successor to the grid-service and hopefuly most of the issues currently on the grid-service will be ironed out.

Another plus for the grid-service is it allows you to host upto 100 domains in one account without any extra charges and every one of those domains can have a database each, allowing you to host all your sites, your friends sites and even client sites if you wanted too. I don’t know about you, but I have a number of websites which are hosted by different providers and for the same services (often less) that i get with the media temple grid service but are a lot more expensive. On average, I’m paying near enough the same amount of money if not more every month for the hosting of one domain than I am for multiple domains on the grid service.

I took a gamble when going for the media temple grid service as I had read a lot of bad reviews online about website downtime and other issues, but liked the look of the site so much and wanted to give their control panel a go. So far I haven’t experienced any downtime on my site (hoping it stays that way) and the customer service has been absolutely phenomenal, a lot better than expected.

Media Temple grid service if far from perfect, but which hosting provider or package is? For the amount of goodies you get with the (gs), although I find the account centre (control panel) slow, $20 dollars a month is a bargain and well justified.

For now, I’m loving the hosting and (mt) definately get my vote.