Mediatemple Moves On

Last night I could not access my email for about 2 hours, at least judging from when I came back to my computer until I went to bed. I wrote a quick support request to my host.

[…] This problems are relatively frequent, I usually ignore them as they don’t last very long, but frankly this time it’s just not what I needed. Please let me know what’s going on, as mail service needs to be more reliable than it currently is. BTW, Google “says” that your Grid is in fact still giving problems to a number of customers…

Mediatemple service had been a bit scatty for me in the past year. I didn’t care much about it, as running this website can’t really be defined a critical operation and the rest of the service is awesome. Sure enough though, the rest cannot make up for long for a core hosting server that is acting weird. The problems I found and did not care to report each time they happened – blame my laziness or praise my patience – mostly ranged between the following:

  • Very slow response times from the server.
  • Seemingly slow execution time of some PHP scripts (this one is based on gut feelings and may be simply caused by the first).
  • Interrupted mail service via POP/IMAP. This one has been quite frequent lately, hence the support request.

Here is a link to the System Status weblog, acknowledging the issue.

What happened after my grumpy support request? They replied super quick as usual, as I found out this morning. I had three emails in my inbox. Two were from the support team, acknowledging the problem and kindly asking to perform some simple troubleshooting tests; the third one was from the CEO of Mediatemple. It was addressed to all customers – only those reporting the problems? – and mentioned something about a downtime on the 28th of February, which I didn’t even notice, but apparently serious enough to trigger that response in the first place. I’ll leave the good PR bit out as Mediatemple does that already quite well on their own, but at the end of the email there was this link. It took about two years to publish that, but at long last we now have a decent half technical, half PR-y, four screen long (maximised at 1080px vertical) explanation of what happened inside The Grid. For now I think this will keep me reassured and going for a little while longer. In the long term (months, not years), it just has to happen as soon as (super)humanly possible.