Over the years we’ve tried numerous hosting companies – Alentus, Webfaction, Joyent, Rackspace, Media Temple – looking for that one perfect host, a host we could see settling down and spending the rest of our lives with. Finally, we got ourselves some slices from the fine lads at Slicehost. Their service, performance, pricing and setup is top-notch. Absolutely no comparison to anything else we’ve tried, especially for Django projects. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks gradually migrating all of our sites over to Slicehost. It’s been a lot of work, but definitely worth the time and effort.

Today, Media Temple validated my hard work.

This morning I tried to SSH into our Dedicated Virtual machine, but got a weird error. After a few more attempts I logged into our Plesk panel to investigate and discovered something odd: none of our Plesk services were running. This meant I effectively had no way of doing anything to our machine to troubleshoot further. I double-checked that the sites on that machine were running, then submitted a ticket to Media Temple’s support system asking them to investigate why SSH and Plesk were not working. Satisfied that I would have an answer within a few hours (Media Temple’s normal response time), I moved onto working on other things.

This was about 3 hours ago. A few minutes ago I logged into Media Temple’s ticketing system and was shocked at their reply:

“I noticed that your server is out of RAM. To free up some memory, I shutdown the httpd service. After this, I was able to reach SSH and I no longer see that you have exceeded your memory limits.”

Yes, you read that correctly. They completely shut down Apache without notifying us. Several of our websites were down today for roughly 3.5 hours, including a few high traffic ones. Luckily I checked the ticket when I did and immediately restarted Apache (which is why you are able to view this very post!).

Now to be fair we are somewhat at fault for letting our RAM usage climb, but why couldn’t they just answer my original question? I’d way rather have SSH and Plesk not responding than have to explain to clients why their website isn’t working. Even restarting would have been a better option. At the very least they could have notified us after shutting Apache.

It’s too bad Media Temple hasn’t worked out for us (we’ve also had performance and platform compatibility issues), as they’re definitely the “coolest” hosting company around. Perhaps their technical department doesn’t work as hard as their marketing department. If websites could be hosted on logos we’d probably stick with (mt). Until then, we’ll continue to use Slicehost.

What about you?
Do you have a hosting horror-story? Who do you recommend?