Pardon my shamelss plug, but MediaTemple is, in my opinion, one of the best web hosting companies out there. We recently moved JoomlaDigger.com to MediaTemple's grid service hosting plan, and I've been so happy with it that I have been transferring all of my domains over as well. MediaTemple's grid service (gs) is cheap, reliable, and powerful. The grid service instantly offers you the processing power of their entire grid of web servers, so even if you have extremely high bursts of traffic (think front page of Digg.com) your web site will never go down.
Best Web Hosting: MediaTemple's Grid Service
Before getting into the details, let me quickly break down the best web hosting features for all the lazy readers who won't read much further:
Best Web Hosting: MediaTemple's Grid Service
Back to the details for anybody still reading.
In a shared hosting environment, your web site sits on the same server as hundreds of other web sites. You share server resources and are limited to a small percentage of the server's processing time. This means that no matter how efficiently your site is configured, your site will timeout if you get too much traffic or if a page takes too much processing time (you can't send out mass emails, run large database queries, or any other processor-intensive actions).
In a virtual or dedicated hosting environment, you have a more powerful server and less restriction on your processing time, but it will cost more and you are ultimately governed by how good your server is if you get too much traffic. And it will cost you anywhere from $80 to $1,000 every month depending on your hosting plan and which hosting company you go through.
MediaTemple's grid service is a completely different technology than the traditional hosting plans. It gives you the very best of shared and dedicated hosting plans without compromising anything. You are given access to an entire grid of servers to power your site, so even under intense traffic spikes your site will never fail. You still have a full cpanel-like backend to manage every aspect of your service. You get cron jobs, analytics, database administration, etc.
One of the best features is that you are allowed to have up to 100 web sites for a single grid service account. That's not a typo, you get to have 100 web sites hosted on a single grid service account. You still have to pay a yearly fee on each domain, just like any other hosting service. MediaTemple charges $15 a year for domains, a standard price, but you can have a different registrar handle your domains if you know of a cheaper one.
And the grid service account only costs $20 a month. Again, that's not a typo. You can have up to 100 web sites hosted on the powerful grid service for only $20 a month
Best Web Hosting: MediaTemple's Grid Service
This is great news for any web designer or developer who wants to run a business creating web sites and hosting them for the client for a fee. You could simply charge a small monthly or yearly fee to manage and host each client's web site, and end up having your hosting paid for (and making a return) just by hosting client sites on your grid service account.
MediaTemple's tech support is very good. So far it has taken their online tech support anywhere from 1 hour to 24 hours to respond to my issues - a little slow sometimes but their techs are very knowledgable and have resolved my problems right away. I have called the 24 hour tech support line 3 times, and have been immediately helped every time.
MediaTemple also has a full knowledge base for troubleshooting and tutorials, and the backend's server guide gives you all the important information you need like system paths, database connection info, etc
MediaTemple is the real deal. Their grid service has the very best features that I have been able to find and I've been extremely happy with the service so far. I've been around the block a few times with hosting plans from several hosting companies, but I highly recommend MediaTemple above any other hosting company I've used. It is definitely one of the best web hosting companies in the market today.
{cbauthor}If you decide that MediaTemple is a good fit for you, please list JoomlaDigger.com as your referring domain. We put a lot of time and effort into free extensions, information, tutorials and support to help out the community and the referrals will lower our hosting costs. Thanks!
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