UPDATE: I began using SiteGround for a WordPress host and have been thrilled with their service in every way so far (read the SiteGround review to learn more). The speed of my sites has increased greatly (the caching tools are awesome) and their support workers have been phenomenal; quick, knowledgeable and friendly. Oh, and their pricing is awesome. While you can find cheaper, you won’t find a better deal on what you receive for your money. I purchased two years of the GoGeek (includes staging, advanced caching, top-notch servers with fewer users, etc.) plan and locked in the price of $14.95 per month for that length of time. For similar features AND unlimited installations, I could easily spend at least 3x that elsewhere. SiteGround has made me very happy in my search for a WordPress host.
Media Temple is Total Sewage!
This post is long overdue. Back in April, I joined Media Temple’s WordPress hosting service and paid for a full year. BIG ASS MISTAKE, people! Let me share why:
Support = SHIT
Out of 16 chat requests and 4 open support tickets, I have NEVER been truly helped by Media Temple support. My latest request was regarding a 500 internal server error on my sitemap_index.xml page generated by the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, a plugin they RECOMMEND. They told me to do the usual (i.e. disable plugins, switch themes, etc.). I informed them that I’m a WordPress developer and doing this was one of the first things I tried. Then, they gave me a link to OTHER (external, non Media Temple) resources! What I find really funny is that they sent me to this page on a similar 500 error using the WordPress SEO plugin. If you scroll down to the final O.P.s post, you’ll notice that his hosting company fixed it for him! Here’s what my hosting company (Media Temple) said:
Unfortunately, assist with 3rd party plugins is no supported. The following information has been found that may possible assist with this issue:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-yoasts-wordpress-seo-sitemap-404-error/
Real nice Media Temple. Thanks for showing me a situation of someone with a hosting company that knows how to provide support. On top of that, I had to wait all day for you to tell me you aren’t going to help!
Also, most of the chat people seem like idiots who do nothing but regurgitate basic information and share links. They are virtually clueless when it comes to WordPress.
For a hosting company that I pay $29 per month (2.5x my shared hosting plan with Host Gator), the level of support I receive is about 1/10 that of Host Gator’s. Whereas I can only think of one or two occasions when Host Gator was not able to resolve my problem (out of dozens of requests), Media Temple hasn’t ever solved one!
Hey Media Temple, why the hell am I paying you 2.5x what I pay Host Gator when you can’t even come close to their quality of support??
Cancelling my Media Temple Account
I’m so done with this piece of crap service. I’m looking into other hosts at this very moment and will have a new provider this week. Please please please, DO NOT use Media Temple because you will be very sorry you wasted your money. If you have any questions, I beg you to ask me because I will do anything I can to prevent you from this kind of awful experience.
For the love of all things holy, AVOID Media Temple
P.S. If you’re a Media Temple representative and are about to comment on this post saying anything other than “We’re sorry and would like to refund you for the entire time you’ve been a customer,” FUCK OFF!
I have been at MT for 15 years. I can only agree – it was pure horror with them. I am so happy i finally switched away (which wasn’t easy since i had 10 Sites, many email accounts with different customers and DNS registrations all over the place). The problems I had included emails (being blacklisted and not arriving at destination without any warning or apparent reason), really bad support – always cryptic answers which never helped – overall very slow performance, extra fees for all kind of things and regular technical issues.
A few weeks ago one of my sites got malware… and the MT solution was to delete all 10 sites and all files from the server. The server was just completely empty. It took over 48 hours to get any answer from them, which of course was cryptic as usual and didn’t help at all. I also launched a paid (79USD) emergency backup restoration request, after a long wait their reply is “We’re sorry but we don’t have any backups, but then you will not have to pay the 79USD.”
So they just go and delete all my websites and don’t even have a backup. I had to restore everything from old local copies, had customers involved which lost content. I lost over a week of work, had to pay my developer a big sum and lost my own customers confidence. Totally inacceptable. Run, run, run….
Media Temple was crashed for 2 days straight from October 1st to October 2nd 2020. They have NOT notified multiple clients that host there about the crash and were fixing it only displaying small notice in their status page. No notices on social media or anywhere else. No email notices. Many hundreds of dollars were lost in PPC ad spend and those losses resulted in more losses not getting regular amount of leads resulting in potential thousands in losses to clients. Needless to say I am closing down at least 3-4 accounts and moving. Goodbye MT. RIP
I am my worst enemy. I have been lazy. I transferred all 12 of my sites out of Mediatemple but kept my one design site there. I wanted to rebuild it and launch it on the new server. After a few years (I know, again my own fault) all Mediatemple had to do is host my few files left and host my emails. They went south as I ended up with a malware alert. I have a few things loaded in my WordPress so it wasn’t through WordPress it was through Mediatemple. With that being siad, they put a SPAM filter on my OUTGOING e-mails without notice… in fact when I asked them they did not even know. Long story short… none of my emails were getting sent, they were blocked. I only figured it out because I found failed emails IN MY SPAM FOLDER. After an hour on the line with MT, they did not have a clue. I then changed the MX records over to hostgator, and it works perfectly. How are they still in business? I will end as I have started; I am my own worst enemy. I post this in hopes everyone currently with MT or thinking about it… will run. run far far away.
PREACH!
I manage several sites on MT’s WordPress Hosted server, many of which have SSL certificates in place, and every month I have to clear out MALWARE and spam files in the site directories for each that just so happen to appear out of nowhere even though the site’s core, plugin, and theme files are routinely up to date. Their hosting is also slow as balls, and has presented several other issues.
99999 % Agree. Media Temple should be out of business. Their support is non-existent. They just do not care about the customer. I also agree SiteGround has been extremely good from the support side of things. I use them for a different client.
I just hope this post is viewed before some poor sucker signs up with them!
I am looking for a Attorny who would be willing to file a class action law suit against Media Temple (MT). It is long over due. We have been a client since 2010 and the service was good up until Dec 2017. MT has cause great harm to my organization and the people we serve, they damaged our website and cause of catastrophic event, they lost critical data when they moved our Web App to a new server. Our site has been down since Feb 2018 and they have locked us out of the Pleask for over over 8 mts to prevent us from seeing the unauthorized access to our code. Some areas we are still locked out. When we call customer support all we get is the run around and lies. They close open tickets that have not been resolved. They attempt to hide the complaint history by closing tickets that have not been resolved. We have requested to talk to a supervisor or have one call us back ASAP. We were promised a supervisor would call us no later than yesterday and they did not call. They have billed my credit card month after month for service we are not receiving. They also discriminate against women and sometimes people of color. Our previous sales rep who is a woman, was very professional but she is no longer there. When I ask if there are any female tech support persons when I encounter a bias, I am told there are none. It appears MT’s new corporate culture is exclusive and not inclusive. Many of the MT tech support people we have talk to are poorly trained and cannot answer simple basic questions. Their gross negligence and bad faith has cause our homeless population and veterans harm, and MT’s customer support does not care that they cause our site to go down that the homeless and veterans count on for alerts. Our website provides life saving information and emergency shelter locations. They don’t really seem to care about anything but covering their butts and their pay check. Media Temple’s customer support is arrogant, careless and unprofessional.
I concur. MediaTemple has become awful ever since the Godaddy purchase. I used them for 10 years and initially was quite happy, mostly because i liked their Admin interface..
But the speed has become AWFUL as they have overloaded the servers to the point where my sites might as well be down. When i ask them about it, they offered to charge me to migrate my account to another server (only to start the process anew).
I am paying about 40 a month for the basic hosting and then another 20 for a db add-on package. Not a lot but not nothing either.
I’d say run, not walk, and sign up with anyone else but MT. Painful to have to migrate your sites (esp email) but once it is over, you will be happi(er)!
I have been with Mediatemple for years and have noticed the service get worse over the time. When it came to rebuilding my website in WordPress I upgraded every feature to guarantee the optimum speeds claimed. Even with numerous support requests, I was unable to ever reach an acceptable / useable speed for the website, only being pushed by support to use the $150 migration service, and pointing me to articles about slow speeds due to 3rd party plugins (the ones I use – have worked fine on 10,000+ websites according to user stats).
After reading the article and having a similar experience with MT myself, I decided to switch to SiteGround. The difference is night and day. Over 50% increase in page speeds and customer service were professional and helpful. I’m moving all of my accounts over to SG – I just wish I’d done it sooner.
I could not agree more with this review.
DO NOT USE MEDIATEMPLE FOR WORDPRESS HOSTING.
Here is my horror story about Media Temple. Just took over a site from a client. The WordPress site utilizes their Premium Whatsoever $220/year hosting plan which does not include their $75/year SSL. Poking around I notice that it’s all GoDaddy, just with a higher price tag.
We start doing some changes and notice that we have to reverse to a previous day. The rollback does not work properly – the site appears without the stylesheet, we are locked out of wp-admin (500 error in backend). Contact support. They roll back for us but appear arrogant. After another three unsuccessful rollbacks, support manager tells us that we are responsible for our content, they won’t do anything about it. So with a developer, we try to upload new files. Not possible in that system. They decline to change permissions. Did I mention this all started because of their rollback errors? No help from them, just stonewalling. Luckily we had the site cloned before doing changes. Ask them if they can clone it over. Sure, they say – for $150.
Set up the domain on another host within minutes. Same speed, better support.
For my part, I will move every site I take care of away from them.
Meh, Media Temple isn’t that bad. I remember REALLY BAD web hosting back in the day -> Ipowerweb. That was torture.
MT support staff is decent. They will throw links at you to solve your own problems, but it works for me. I feel safer with MT over hostgater, that’s for sure…
Saying MT is better than HG is not really saying much at all imo. It’s a great big world out there, and there are plenty of good hosting companies besides those two.
Media Temple looks great, but they offer expensive, slow hosting. If you charge more than the cheap hosts do, the sites at least need to run quickly and smoothly. I’ve got years of consistently bad experience with sites on this platform (2015 – 2018) thanks to a client who recommended them to multiple clients of theirs.
And I’ve tried chatting with their support on multiple occasions about slowness and always they say: all is well, it’s coming up fine for us. Guess what? I’m not a moron and I have many sites on several other hosts to compare load speed with. They suck! Moving another site away from them today and hoping to get everyone moved eventually.
And the sad thing is Media Temple WAS a good host at one time.
Thank you for this guide. Yes, you are right. I am also using Siteground wordpress hosting plan and they have many great features. After working with a sub-par web host for so long, I just can’t believe how amazing SiteGround is.
Moreover, their customer services is unbelievable. Not only is it fast, but their staff is very knowledgeable. If you set up any sort of eCommerce business,
I have one question. I am currently having one of my sites developed on Magento as well and it is hosted on Host Gator and it is extremely slow. I would like to find a hosting that is suitable, fast and efficient for Magento by the time I launch the store. what would like to recommend is siteground again better option for magento hosting as well. or is there any other site specialized in magento hosting?
A few years ago Media Temple’s customer service department went above and beyond to help me, but even before GoDaddy bought them out the customer service began to degrade rapidly. Instead of helping me through my issues until they were resolved, they started to just send me links to their “knowledge base” of articles in order to figure things out myself. Most of the time the articles they sent me were not related to the problem and were just a way to avoid helping me. I no longer recommend them to anyone.
Avoid Media Temple at ALL costs. Purchased 2x domains (and a site) from 1 of their customers. The sale went smoothly, no drama BUT trying to get both domains transferred has been an ongoing nightmare – Media Temple still refusing to release domains. Support tickets not answered, left in “open” state for literally weeks. Finally closed, only to discover all have been mysteriously answered with back dated date. Really???!!!
Today both domains expire and still Media Temple have not released them to my Godaddy account.
In over 20 years as a web developer, this is truly the worse experience I’ve ever had. Save yourself a massive amount of time, frustration and money, by avoiding Media Temple like the plague!
That’s an unfortunate experience for you. I’ve had just the opposite. To be fair, as far as website hosting, I’ve only personally tried out Media Temple. My website loading speeds test above par and their support is simply amazing. They have all sorts of documentation but I simply pull up the chat and within minutes (if not seconds) they pop up and have my problem solved in no time. I literally could not have done it without them lol.
It looks as though your site is now hosted with SingleHop.com – what were your reasons for migrating away from SiteGround?
Hey Jonathan,
EngageWP is still hosted by SiteGround, nothing has changed. SingleHop is a datacenter partner of SiteGround.
Hi Ren, I decided to purchase Mediatemple’s Personal plan due to their low price. And their long list of WordPress hosting feature attracted me. Feeling lucky that I found your review before purchasing. I Think I should go with pressidium.
I think I’m going to take the plunge and install WordPress on AWS EC2 and be done with it. Super fast and infinite resource and cost scalability, it’s a no brainer.
Hi Ren,
Thank you for sharing your experience. The thing is that I am having “500 internal server error” for Yoast Seo sitemap_index.xml issue on site ground gogeek hosting and they are not understanding the issue and they are saying the sitemap_index.xml does not exists. If it does not exists it should give 404 error so they are not being a great help for me.
Could you please share how you fixed the that issue you described so I could give it a try.
Thanks.
Media Temple has bad server security! Their WordPress sites are constantly being attacked with malware. They blame their customers for the attacks and then suspend your site. Sites without WordPress are also attacked, disproving their accusations that the attacks are due to customers not updating WordPress. Avoid this awful hosting company!
so true
When I first started building sites I used Hostgator. I didn’t like their service or their interface and they tried to upsell so much. I switched to Siteground as well and have loved it every bit! I was looking for some premium hosting to use for a new site and was looking into Media Temple. I will have to rethink that thought now. Thanks for sharing this. -Cheers
I’ve been using HostGator since September of 2009. They were great at the beginning, then became awful and unreliable when EIG took them over. I almost switched hosts, but then things there began to stabilize.
There have been some uptime issues over the past several years, but nothing bad to speak of in the last 2 years or so. I went from almost posting an angry rant about them to going back to recommending HostGator. I have definitely seen an improvement in both speed and uptime over the past couple of years. Meanwhile, support has been great. For the record: I use a shared hosting plan, on which I host multiple Web sites without issue.
I have a client using Medial Temple, and I concur with much of what you’re saying. I have no idea why anyone would use MT: it’s slow, restrictive, and prone to reliability issues. Overhyped and overpriced indeed!
Hostgator is awful. I used them for a while then I wanted to cancel my account and they continued to charge me for months. I have been trying to cancel with them for 3yrs (not joking). I changed my card so they could not continue to charge me but they still call me every couple months to say I am past due or I receive an email about how my account will be suspended if I don’t update my payment info.
This is just a screenshot of two emails… but notice the request to cancel in Aug. 2014 and their invoice come Sept. 2015. I have deleted everything after that and Gmail marks them as spam now (anything *@hostgator.com as well as other domains they’ve used).
http://imgur.com/a/WtDvN
Hostgator.. never again!
I have been using MT for years now and use the Grid, DV and manages wordpress. The are all wonderful and highly capable products and need to be closely matched to the requirements of you website. I use the grid for very small sites (up to 5000 visitors a month) and premium WordPress for upto 50000 visitors a month (I do use cloudflare) and it works just fine for me. I have had great experience with their support also, only thing that has changed after godaddy acquired them is they up-sell more.
MT is not bad at all you just had a bad experience.
My experience was clearly not an isolated one.
@Ren, I am 100% with you! I have had issues with MT WP hosting for so damn long. Back in 2013 I opened a ticket with them because every single WP install I had was horribly slow. In some cases it would take as long as 30sec to load my landing page. Their support said “you must have some plugins that are slowing things down”. I told them even fresh 1-click installs didn’t have any improvement. I even setup their dedicated wordpress hosting and it was just as slow! So I went to Godaddy and set up the same exact site to show them how much faster it was (GD was instantly loading my site vs. MT was taking minimum of 10sec). Their customer service responded with “there’s too many variables for that to be a good test”. Like, oh you mean the variables of your horrible gridhosting?! That was back in 2013, it’s now 2017 and the problems persist.
I am going to eventually set up my own hosting on DigitalOcean. Setup some custom scripts where I can do something like ‘wp -d “www.website.com”‘ in the command line and have it do an install of wp for the domain. The problem is I host about 6 wordpress sites on MT and I’m not looking forward to moving them.
I have been with Media temple for almost 10 years and it used to be really good. I have using the grid service. They use to answer request very fast and did their best to help.
However, for the last two, their service has become really bad and my wp site are slowing down massively although I have optimised them a lot (wp-rocket) and use cdn for static files. Today, the server response time was over 3 seconds!!!
Looking to use a vps and had a look at Mammoth , actually their parent company in Oz i.e. Binarylane. Has anyone ever used them ?
I recommend RoseHosting, I have been with them for more than 4 months now and I am very satisfied with their level of service.
Using VPS clearly more fun than shared web hosting. As we know many web hosting providers restrict their clients in terms of server resources. That’s for sure!
How about websynthesis?
i have just order their webhost and still in the process of migration.
At the same time, i have just checked that Genesis.com is hosted in Mediatemple? what the heck?
I’ve never used them, but I’ve heard pretty good things about them. Synthesis is owned by Rainmaker Media, which is the same company behind StudioPress and the Genesis Framework. However, Genesis.com is the website for the car, not the Genesis Framework (that is studiopress.com).
Yep, agree with you on Media Temple. They started sucking once Godaddy bought them. And yes Siteground is way better but they are not perfect either. That unlimited plan only allows 450k files and you are not allowed to install more than one SSL certificate per entire account. Despite all of this I do think they are one of the best after wpEngine for WordPress. There is a blog post that compares Media Temple, Wpengine and Siteground that I like here: https://fabriceleven.com/dev/why-we-switched-to-siteground-hosting/ and they ended up going with Siteground despite liking Wpengine more. G
Good post Ren!
LOL Realy MT is GoDaddy with $19 markup.
If you care about your site use a real host Pantheon, PressLabs Pagely, Kinsta you will be less mad after a long day & say of jail.
Got a new client that’s on there, what a clusterfck, can’t even connect through FTP with the settings they specify… Thanks for shining the light on another crap host..
So..you posted a rant about a crappy hosting service while providing an affiliate link to another crappy hosting service. Nope. No irony there.
Your experience will not change until:
1. You educate yourself more about hosting and
2. You stop using WordPress, which is pretty much a virus in itself.
Good luck.
Jayden,
Thanks for your pretentious comment. Let me address some of your nonsense.
Well, my experience has changed, Jayden. A lot. I’ve been extremely happy with SiteGround, and it’s been a 1.5 years. I actually have multiple accounts with them, and I’ve referred many of my clients, all of whom have been happy with them. In fact, SiteGround is recommended by WordPress. There are many people who recommend SiteGround because they provide a quality service, solid performance, and useful features, all at a very reasonable price. Their support has also been fantastic.
Regarding my affiliate links: I don’t know if you run your own blog, but I’m going to guess you don’t, since you seem to not understand that many bloggers use affiliate links to generate revenue that helps pay for free content and expenses. Additionally, affiliate links are included in only a small number of my posts, so my content is much more about substance than affiliate income.
Lastly, your comment about WordPress is ridiculous. WordPress didn’t get to the level of powering over 25% of the web by being “a virus.”
Keep up the excellent work sharing your negative opinions, and poor, unsolicited attitude.
I wished i had never seen this post.
Moved a wordpress site that Normally does about 10,000 unique visitors from linode to siteground. Was advised to by their support to order the $60 entry level cloud hosting as the wordpress plans can’t handle that.
Two days later and additional $30+(for extra RAM and CPU), my site cant go an hour without being down at least twice.
All they keep saying is buy more RAM. my Linode was at 2GB and handled the site well, but at 4GB and more CPU, siteground can’t handle same site. All they want is more money.
Moving back to MT wordpress this week where I have another site with more traffic performing well for two years, apart from the one weekend day I didn’t get support on time.
I have used MT, Linode, Digital Ocean, WP Engine and now siteground for different project over the past 7 years. none have been as unreliable as Siteground.
Yes, they respond to first ticket message under 10 minutes, but never once solved a problem for me.
Absolutely regret ever trusting them with a client’s site.
Sorry to hear that. Surprisingly, this has been the first negative review I’ve heard about SG, especially when compared to Media Temple (a lot of bad about MT).
Why’s that?
I am just wondering why did you leave WP Engine? I have heard nothing but positive about them. I want to use them but they would be too pricy for the traffic I get.
Absolutely agree! Worst Hosting Service ever, fullstop! Stay clear, stay away!
Paid a year up front too, kept trying to cancel the service, the MT support douche’s were no help, they ended up renewing me for another year, direct debited my CC then closed my account.
Absolute joke!
“For the love of all things holy, AVOID Media Temple
P.S. If you’re a Media Temple representative and are about to comment on this post saying anything other than “We’re sorry and would like to refund you for the entire time you’ve been a customer,” FUCK OFF!”
Under promise and over deliver. That’s the golden rule in business.
Media Temple does the exact opposite. It’s obvious that they place greater emphasis on polishing their website and marketing funnel than they do on providing a quality hosting service.
I hosted numerous websites with MT for 3 years and also recommended 4 or 5 clients. I sorely regret that decision.
Their support has always been much slower than other hosting companies I have experience with. I won’t name them because I don’t want you to think my review is biased.
Anyways, the last straw for me came when Media Temple shut down one of my dedicated servers due to an outdated WordPress plugin being “potentially vulnerable”. Rather than call or email me, the decided to shut my server off on a weekend. This was a server dedicated, so only my sites were on it. This arbitrary, unexpected shut down led to one of my high-traffic sites being taken offline that was currently receiving AdWords traffic to it.
So they cost me money not only in potential revenue, but also in AdWords clicks that were being sent to a down website.
Media Temple treats their customers like lowly cattle, and they will charge you an arm and a leg just to be in their cattle pen.
It’s amazing that in the 2016 age of social media any companies still resort to operating as if they are in a vacuum with no competitive alternatives, but alas, here we are.
P.S.
MT is now owned by GoDaddy, and most online professionals understand what a terrible reputation GoDaddy and their management have earned themselves in recent years.
Do you own Google search and see for yourself. Or better yet, go through one of their shopping carts and see how many useless upsells you get bombarded with.
Is that really the type of company you want to affiliate your business with?
I was also at Media Temple and am very happy it SiteGround.
At Media Temple, the system has just shot up my website.
The support of MT is really useless. 1-2 days response time and the 1-Level Supporter have no rights at all.
So you have to wait again one day until the 2-level support offers his help. The do not even read the ticket history and restored a OLD database. So all changes were simply gone!
About one day work! Excuses are not pronounced. Just standardised marketing responses.
The web interface ac.mediatemple.net is so slow, as well as the backend of WordPress. For a small text change you wait 5-30 seconds.
Never ever Mediatemple. We now transfer all domains away to SiteGround.
Top super, top and fast servers worldwide, top features – thank you Sideground! Shame on you at Mediatemple. Mediatemple: Instead of recording beautiful Marketing videos, you would do your homework better! My tip as entrepreneur and computer scientist.
media temple has the most awful customer service i have EVER received.
i work with tons of web hosts and customer service teams on a daily basis. it’s the most limiting, “hands-off” WordPress hosting experience i could ever imagine.
WITHOUT fail, their general attitude to literally EVERY question, concern, or issue, is “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” – NMFP – “not my fucking problem” – the demeanor of 4 out of 5 agents.
It’s comical, every time i get on live chat i’m just blown away at how much they don’t give a single f*ck about anyone. SO OVER IT.
I am amazed they have any customers at all
I moved all my sites to mediatemple from hostgator as well, and perhaps i’ll try siteground now.
Hey, Rick. Sorry to hear about that. I know the feeling. I hope you get everything sorted out soon.
Stay far far away from Media Temple. I was a customer in the past and the GoDaddy stench is all over their products and especially their WordPress implementation– which by the way is just GoDaddy WordPress with different graphics.
The rest of their solutions are just as bad or getting worst. You can have far better products and support for the prices they charge.
Hey, Jon. Sorry to hear about your experience. That was really my main problem. For the money, you can get much better quality in terms of support. They’re holding themselves out as WordPress experts, but their support people apparently have no clue what they’re doing.
I must also agree. For the most part, in my 2 years with Media Temple for my personal sites, the service has been amazing. I too am a developer with a ton of experience working on WordPress sites and must add that it feels like a bargain to get the support offered for only $20+ a month. I have never been (nor am i) been employed by the organization discussed here by the way…
The team at Media Temple has been helpful almost always (one exception i can think of). After seeing what some of my past clients would go through this seems like a pretty good deal:
Ive worked with several companies whom used WordPress, that were paying thousands a year for dedicated servers with certain providers, and could not even get technical support to do simple things such as create a backup (liability reasons apparently if they damage anything on the MySQL tables… so management must simply tell everyone to keep hands off instead of risking it and being helpful).
As mentioned in the post, I too started to look around at one point once I found out GoDaddy had bought out the guys at Media Temple. My opinion has always been that GoDaddy makes incredibly poor choices when it comes to pretty much anything they can get there hands on). However Media Temple managed to maintain their name, and do a pretty good job of keeping everything separate from GoDaddy. If anything GoDaddy has appeared to be making their first intelligent choice which is to mold themselves and their brand to that of Media Temple (albeit a crappy brand having been defecated on by the likes of ridiculous nascar driver campaigns).
I hope I never get to the place which the author has written of, and strong encourage maybe a second chance with Media Temple. However sometimes its a bad match and theres nothing anyone can do I guess.
Hi, Jimmy. I’m glad you haven’t had any issues, but a lot of people have and still are seeing the same problem. Darryl just commented as well and reported the same issues that I had. Personally, I’d never give Media Template another chance. Their support was so amateur and I keep hearing stories that are identical to mine. I have been thrilled with SiteGround’s service in every way, so I will continue to use them as my primary host.
I dont know how I ended up here, but I thought I would chime in anyway. I’ve had nothing but stellar performance and support from media temple, the grid is fast and easy to use IMO. VPS can be tricky but thats the risk you take if you need that kind of thing. I’m fairly experienced managing wordpress hosting so my questions for tech support are always to the point and their quality and time to reply has always been good. In saying that, I’ve never used their managed wordpress hosting and personally don’t see the point.
I’ve had some shocking experience with hosts in my time as a developer, support turn around time has been awful, servers have been slow and the whole process generally painstaking. Specifically godaddy, crucial, panthur and site5 to name a few. In comparison to those guys MT have been fantastic.
GoDaddy owns MediaTemple, so…..
My experience is that the managed WordPress product used to be a good option for people without any admin experience making it easy enough to create a staging site, create and restore from backups, etc.
That has changed dramatically ever since they were sold. I end up doing most of the support for friend’s sites hosted by them – support just tells you to disable your plugins once they get around to replying. Caching problems, redirection problems, screwing up hostnames, long wait times… haven’t been impressed with their support at all of the last year.
Really late in my comment timing but WOW, I hate to see people experience problems like what everyone has had here. For myself, I would probably not use MT WordPress hosting solution, but I’ve been using MT for over 5 years now without any problems with the Grid hosting. Support has been generally fast in as little as a few minutes to perhaps as long as 2 hours at most. But the truth is, there will always be issues with “any” web host provider for some people. In a perfect world, we would have a host that is 100% up-time, super instant support, and super fast servers, but realistically, that kind of host does not exist. I will be honest in saying that when I found out Godaddy was taking over MT, I cringed in the corner, but so far, I haven’t noticed anything go wrong yet. If or until it does, then I would look at other options.
Oh, just a bit step more and I have joined with you on MT if I don’t read this review.
Would like to chime in and say that I too have been having major issues with MediaTemple on my WordPress site. Over 10+ support requests the past 2 months and 1) the site is either goes down for no reason other than “our clusters are having issues at the moment but are being fixed” or 2) here’s a link to some Google’d article, “help yourself”
Anyone considering MediaTemple for WordPress needs to stay far far far away. They’ve only gotten worse since GoDaddy bought them out.
Currently in the process of switching providers, they’ve done nothing to help me with my site.
Hey, Kent. Sounds like my issue down to the last detail. Sorry to hear. The one positive that came out of it for me was the appreciation for a quality host. Thanks to (mt) doing almost everything wrong, I realized what a good host should provide.
Hi Ren:
Just came across this via Twitter. I had my main site on (mt) for a brief period a couple of years ago. While I didn’t have the vitriol you did towards my experience, I did end up ditching their service to go to A Small Orange. The problem wasn’t necessarily their servers, but their support was less than exemplary. Definitely not worth the premium cost.
Several people I know stayed with (mt), even after they sold to GoDaddy. Many left though.
I’ve had shared hosting with HostGator before. Their support is responsive and helpful, no complaints there. But after they joined EIG, their shared hosting became too slow for my use.
ASO isn’t a managed WordPress host, but their support is always quick and helpful, and their servers are pretty fast. They have outages in their Dallas data center from time to time, that’s my only real complaint.
I have some sites I manage on Siteground as well. Not as fast as ASO (perhaps I don’t have the caching set up optimally), but an excellent bargain for the price. (Tip for everyone: If you’re targeting the USA, make sure your sites are on the US data center servers).
I’ve had some dealings with WPEngine before as well (client sites). Excellent speed. You pay a bit more than elsewhere, but seems to be worth it.
Flywheel is a managed WordPress host I’d like to try. The benchmarks seem to suggest they have excellent speed, and they cost just a bit less than WPEngine.
From what I hear, the managed WP hosting at GoDaddy has drastically improved, and is pretty fast. (Ironic, considering this article). Shared hosting at GD I would still view with extreme skepticism.
Thanks!
Hey, John. Yeah, (mt) claimed to be some top-notch managed host for WP but then a tech asked what I meant by “managed host” when I asked them why I was paying for managed WordPress hosting with such crappy support. I couldn’t believe it.
Hostgator has been increasingly disappointing as well. I’ve used them for years for unimportant things (i.e. demos and live development) because it’s only $10 a month. However, the speed and performance has gotten pretty bad. Heavy WordPress installs can have significant load times. Anything important, such as my sites and client sites I manage, I keep on Siteground.
SG has been excellent. Nice performance, excellent support and the value is great. It also uses cPanel, which I like. They even have a partnership with WP Rocket for even better performance (plus their own caching system, which is awesome).
From here on out, I plan to stay away from everything to do with GoDaddy, especially since I’ve learned their CEO likes to kill elephants.
The elephant killing is a big reason people jumped ship when GoDaddy took over (mt). But I think the old CEO, Bob Parsons, left in 2011. They have a new guy, Blake Irving, who has been trying to do damage control on the years of negative reputation that GoDaddy built up.
Thanks for pointing that out. I remember reading about it but never looked into whether he was still with GD.
From what I’ve heard, (mt) hasn’t made any significant changes since I left. That whole operation struck me as them trying to jump on the WP managed hosting bandwagon without being prepared. I was never dissatisfied with their server performance but at $30 per month, the customer service and technical support is a deal breaker. I wonder how much the experience differs between (mt) and the actual GD managed hosting.
Tried MediaTemple in the past, would never go back. I use ASmallOrange now, they’ve been awesome.
SiteGround is using an offshore service in Panama to hide themselves. This is enough to never consider them as host. There are also a lot of hidden costs like expensive external domains, expensive internal domains, expensive certificates, etc.
I’ve been happy with SiteGround’s performance, support, knowledge of WordPress (Media Temple seemed to jump on the WP hosting bandwagon without being fully prepared) and overall service, as have many other customers. It’s not for no reason they’ve become such a popular host. For the same price as other managed WordPress hosts, I think customers get a better value. I’m happy paying them.
Unreal. Each and every WP upgrade that I do on MediaTemple (from within the admin panel) takes 5 to 10 minutes. It would normally take 30 seconds. This has been going on for weeks and MT has no answer.
And for the record, I am just using the regular gird service. I cannot believe how bad MediaTemple sucks for WordPress hosting. Bluehost, Hostgator are 1000% percent better for half the cost.
I am pissed, I have to move all my sites of MT. What a waste of time.
Ryan
Hey, Ryan. Sorry to hear about that. It was very angering wasting so much time and money with them. For what it’s worth, if you’re looking into a WordPress host, I switched to SiteGround after leaving Media Temple and couldn’t be happier with everything. Both their support and performance are excellent. I’d suggest checking them out.
OK I bit late in discussion but can you tell me, If I want to move from shared to vps, which hosting companies should I consider? I was seriously thinking about media temple,but reading your post saved me.
For what it’s worth, I was relatively satisfied with my shared hosting plan from Host Gator and I know they offer VPS that I’ve heard good things about. I’ve also heard that InMotion has a solid VPS service but I haven’t used them so I can’t vouch for them first hand.
This is the same story that just happened to me.
It’s just awful. It made me look like a bad developer with my client.
The support is horrible and they did not fix anything. For days, trying to have an answer from them. Nothing.
JUST DONT HIRE WP MT.
Hey, Diego. Thanks for sharing. Sorry to hear that you’ve had to go through this as well.
Why would you even market your product as “WordPress Hosting” if you can’t offer WordPress support? 🙁
Great question, Andrei. That’s what I’ve thought every time Media Temple has disappointed me. If you provide no special WordPress support other than a specific installation, are you really a WordPress host? I can say that Media Temple is certainly no WordPress host because they seem to know very little about WordPress. Perhaps that’s why they have NEVER been of any help.
I’ve also seen hosts that have “WordPress Hosting” offers but it’s actually just cause you can one-click install WordPress from their cPanel. It’s ridiculous.
Media Temple isn’t extremely different. Any hosting company can offer a “customized” installation by automatically installing some plugins. For that matter, I can do the same for any of my clients. Bundling plugins doesn’t make you a WordPress host. Having nobody for customers to turn to for WordPress-specific problems does, however, prove you are not a WordPress host.
Would you like to test our hosting? I’d be glad to set up a free 1-month trial for you.
Hi Ren,
I’ve experienced the same thing. There support is useless. I’ve had 3 clients where there sites are hosted on MT and of all my queries/issues none of them get answered in away that would fix the problem. Worst is that they don’t get to understand what your problem is and keeps on sending useless links even if you already provided them “FULL” details from every information possible including screenshots.
It was such a relief when those 3 clients of mine were able to transfer to another host right away when we get to discuss MT’s performance.
Hey, Clint. Thanks for commenting. This is exactly my problem. They don’t do crap to diagnose your problem. Instead, they assume and send stupid links that people could easily find themselves. I have never talked to any support group for any product/service I’ve ever purchased that seems to care less about my problems than the Media Temple support.
you hit it right on the money bro, they never actually do anything, im talking right now and this guy keeps posting links. what other hosting company would you suggest?
Hey, Darryl. Sorry to hear about that. It doesn’t surprise me, though. I’ve been very happy with SiteGround. Been using them for over a year now.
Wow. Good to know. I’m looking for a managed WP host and (mt) was on my list of final 3. That list is now down to 2. Thanks for the post Ren. You saved me a big headache.
Hi, Dave. Having saved one person from that cesspool of a company, I feel like I’ve done my job (I won’t quit, though). Also, Media Temple is NOT a managed WordPress host like WP Engine or Pagely. I was under the impression that it was and I mentioned this during my first (and failed) interaction with “support.” The person I talked to didn’t know what I was referring to when I mentioned the term “managed WordPress host” and that’s when I found out they’re really just another hosting company that markets to WordPress users. Most of the chat people don’t even know much about WordPress other than how to find shareable links in the support forum.
Thanks for posting!