Setting up Ruby on Rails on Media Temple's Grid Service - The Redux

So we’re no longer hosting this blog on Media Temple. Unfortunately their support was nothing short of terrible.

If you haven’t done so, you may like read my first post about setting up this blog on Media Temple.

The site went down 4 days ago and promptly I opened a support ticket which, in itself, was quite a pleasant experience. I couldn’t open the ticket without first being reminded of the knowledge base of answers they have, unfortunately none of which were could tell me how to revive my server. Still, it is definitely worth pushing these articles at people as I suspect most hosts do waste a lot of time answering common problems.

As I composed my message a list of knowledge base articles dynamically updated on the side, doing their best to relate to the words I was typing, all very slick indeed.

However, the site was still down a day later and still with no response from Media Temple. Not even a quick reply to at least let me know someone human had received the ticket and perhaps even read it.

So I posted a follow up to the ticket requesting a response of some sort. Another day later and I finally get an email (from which I can’t reply to directly, which really grinds me, but that’s another blog post). In the email I was told that some maintenance was being carried out on the MySQL containers and that there was no estimated time for completion.

They also informed me “you will experience a brief disruption in service”. Now, I’m not sure I agree that three days downtime is ‘brief’, but what I find most surprising is the lack of resources to cover for this maintenance, add to that the lack of communication to their customers and you have one canceled account.

Fortunately we were within our trial period so we got a full refund and promptly moved the blog up onto our own dedicated server we host with Rackspace.