hyalineskies

If you had asked me what I had thought of DreamHost six months ago, I would’ve given you rave reviews. After all, DreamHost offered me a ton of space, unbelievable bandwidth, and as many databases as I could ever, well, dream of. There seemed to be no better host than DreamHost.

Meanwhile, as my MySpace tutorials took off and my traffic nearly doubled overnight, hyalineskies and all of the other domains on my account died horribly, all of my data falling off the Internet due to a fileserver crash.

Oh well, I thought; it’s just a fileserver. They’ll have it back online soon. Unfortunately, that filer didn’t come back up the following day, so I sent Dreamhost an e-mail. They replied some 12 hours later, saying that they’re working on it as my issue is the same one affecting others. For the next four days, hyalineskies was on the Internet equivalent of a roller coaster, appearing sometimes, disappearing the next, up and down as the DreamHost techs and their one fileserver pleased.

I got fairly mad at the whole situation and sent DreamHost yet another e-mail, with their OMG! EVERYTHING IS DYING! tag. You’d think that if a company assumed that there’d be some extended downtime that they’d transfer your data to a backup fileserver until they could get the old one online; after all, what good is a host that doesn’t have backup hardware in case of failure? Instead of hearing anything new (and totally dodging my “Why aren’t we on a different server yet?” argument,) DreamHost hands me the same form letter I had previously.

Absolutely furious, I decided it was time to find a new host. I had heard a lot of good things about MediaTemple, but the prices seemed absolutely oppressive compared to what I had been paying with Dreamhost previously. I was paying $20 for what seemed like 10% of the functionality with MediaTemple, but in return I’d actually get 24×7 phone and email support. Since I was working on releasing this version of hyalineskies at the time, I decided that if any time was good to switch hosts it was now, and I signed up for MediaTemple’s cheapest solution that day.

Ironically enough, that day was the first day I had trouble with mySQL on MediaTemple. As I tried to import databases at 3:00 EST, phpMyAdmin miraculously failed, and trying to run the database commands via the mysql command-line interface resulted in out-of-memory errors. I phoned up their 24×7 technical support, and ten minutes later, the tech not only fixed the problem with mySQL, but offered to install WordPress and my databases for me. (I politely declined.)

The shared server system worked really well for me; that’s why when I heard about MediaTemple’s new (gs) Grid Server system some months ago, I was ready to make the switch. The scalability and reliability of the grid server seemed to be exactly what I needed; after all, scalability was the problem with Dreamhost some months prior. I took the leap from my (ss) Shared Server to the (gs) Grid Server, and I hoped that all would work out okay.

It didn’t. A few weeks ago, I was dealing with endless mySQL errors, with the database server randomly dying and leaving hyalineskies looking crippled. I had to install a ton of caching systems to take the load off of the weak database servers (now I’m beginning to think that hyalineskies could take on a lot more traffic than I would ever expect,) and my call to MediaTemple ended up sounding a lot like the Dreamhost call I had made over the summer: hold on, we’re working on it. We’re working on it turned into a week of we’re working on it, and I was beginning to wonder if I had made the right choice after all. Maybe I just needed to shell out the money for a dedicated server or something.

Thankfully, MediaTemple ended up resolving their problems (and thanks to all of the hyalineskies caching working on the backend, the problems didn’t rear their ugly heads even while the database was sporadic.) However, while with Dreamhost all I saw was an whiny, emo rant from CEO Josh Jones, MediaTemple did something serious: they recognised the problems I had been having with my Grid Server and compensated me not for the time it was down, but for the following two months of service. That means that hyalineskies bills are, well, non-existent until February.

Bad PR vs. Good PR

There is a moral to this whole story, though: they say you never really see the real side of someone until they’re falling apart under pressure, and this is certainly the case when it comes to companies. While Dreamhost whined, bitched, and grumbled about their fileserver problems, leaving their customers out to dry, MediaTemple recognised their faults, apologised for the mess, and said “Here, let me make it up to you.”

It has very little to do with the free aspect of what MediaTemple did, even though I like getting hosting for free. It has to do with the fact that MediaTemple recognised that they had gone horribly wrong, and that those paying for their services were realising that they were doing something wrong to begin with. While DreamHost eventually ‘fessed up to their problems in August, weeks after the issues began, eventually conceding to their own incompetence (which was both a hardware and personnel issue according to Jones,) MediaTemple gave a different message to its clients. MediaTemple recognised their (hardware’s) incompetence, bought a bunch of new machines to tack onto the grid network, and then told their Grid Server clients that they didn’t have to pay for incompetence, as that’s not what they signed on for. Dreamhost, on the other hand, said “Well, you see, sorry, but you have to pay for the mistakes we’ve made anyway.” It’s akin to having a restaurant totally maul your order into an irreplaceable mess and then making you pay for them to get it right. It’s the company that should shoulder the responsibility, not the customer. This is what makes the difference between a company that I’d deal with in the future and one that I’ll wave my goodbye to.

MediaTemple has been a perfect example of Rule #6 of the 9 Rules of the 9rules Network: you get what you pay for. I really just wish I would’ve recognised that applied to web hosting sooner than I did.