Media Temple

Media Temple Hosting Review 2017

In this review, we’ll dig into the managed shared hosting services offered by Media Temple. We’ll give you a quick glance at all of the features you get when hosting with Media Temple and also take you through the real-world performance tests we ran.

Founded all the way back in 1998, Media Temple has a longstanding reputation for quality in web hosting. While not the cheapest web host, they have transparent prices and don’t deceptively throw around the term “unlimited” like many other budget hosts. We find this refreshing. And with Media Temple currently hosting over 1.5 million websites for their 125,000+ customers, we’re not alone.

In 2013, Media Temple was acquired by GoDaddy, though GoDaddy is committed to running Media Temple as a completely separate business.

Keep reading to learn more about Media Temple’s managed hosting features as well as to see performance data from our real-world tests.

Overview of Media Temple Hosting Features

Here’s what you can expect when you host with Media Temple:

• Transparent pricing – know exactly how much hosting you’re getting for your money.
• Automatic software updates – you never need to worry about updating WordPress or other supported software.
• SSD storage – solid state drives offer improved performance over older physical drives.
• Security and DDoS protection – rest easy knowing your site is protected.
• 30-day automatic backups – Media Temple automatically keeps 30 days of backups to secure your data.
• PHP7 – the latest version of PHP offers improved performance
• 24/7/365 support – get support via phone, email, or chat whenever you need it.

Those are the features, but how about the performance? Let’s check it out!

Media Temple Hosting Performance – Real Testing Data

To get a feel for how Media Temple performs in the wild, we set up a test site and ran it through some paces. For reference, our test site was hosted at Media Temple’s west coast data center (though the Grid system we’ll talk about later renders this fairly unimportant).

First, we took a look at the Time to First Byte of our test site. This is a good general measure of how quickly a web server responds to requests. Media Temple clocked in at 0.45 seconds. This is about…right in the middle of the sites that we tested. The fastest hosts we tested typically responded in under 0.10 seconds, so Media Temple isn’t quite up to speed. But, they are solidly in the middle. So-so marks so far.

Next, we tested average page load speed. This is how long it took our test site, on average, to completely load. Here, Media Temple came in at 2.51 seconds, which is fairly disappointing. It’s not the slowest speed we tested, but it is in the bottom third.

Finally, we tested the general uptime for our test site. Again, the results were fairly disappointing. Our test site was only up 99.85% of the time, which is well below most hosts we tested. The difference between 99.85% and 99.95% may not seem like a lot, but it adds up to about an extra 45 minutes of downtime per month.

Overall, we saw fairly lackluster performance in our testing. While not horrible, Media Temple consistently performed in the bottom third of hosts that we looked at, which is tough to get excited about.

Media Temple Data Center Locations

Your data center is the actual physical location where your website is hosted. Because the proximity of your server to your target readers can affect how quickly your site loads for them, it’s important to find a host that offers a data center in your target market.

Media Temple offers data centers on both the east and west coasts of the USA. While this is excellent coverage for websites targeting North American readers, anyone targeting Europe, Asia, or elsewhere may want to consider a host with data centers in those locations.

Upgrading to Media Temple’s Grid Pro system will also get you global delivery and remove this data center issue.

Media Temple Grid System

One of the unique things about Media Temple is its Grid platform. While still technically shared hosting, Grid spreads your site over networked hardware. As a result, your data is spread across multiple data centers, giving you a de facto content delivery network (CDN) for North America (or globally for those who upgrade to Pro).

The Grid system also includes all SSD storage as well as the latest, highest performing technologies like PHP7.

Media Temple Support and Documentation

With US-based customer support agents available 24/7/365, Media Temple offers excellent support. You can contact them via phone, chat, or even Twitter if you’re willing to work within the confines of 140 characters.

For those who value self-service, they also offer a small knowledge base. But it’s nothing to write home about.

Media Temple Plans and Pricing

As we mentioned, Media Temple is not the cheapest host out there. But they do have the benefit of being 100% transparent about their pricing. They don’t try to oversell you with over-the-top “unlimited” offers like many other hosts.

They currently offer three different pricing tiers for their basic managed Grid hosting. Here’s what you get with each tier:

Their Personal plan starts at $20 per month and supports 100 sites, 20GB SSD storage, and 1TB bandwidth.

Their Pro plan starts at $30 per month and supports 500 websites, 100GB SSD storage, and 2TB bandwidth.

Finally, their Agency plan starts at $150 per month and supports 2,500 websites, 500GB SSD storage, and 5TB bandwidth. You also get some added features and free SSL with annual plans.

With all of their plans, you get two months free when you opt for annual billing instead of monthly billing, which can make the pricing a little more affordable.

For those who need more power, Media Temple also offers VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting.

Should You Choose Media Temple Web Hosting?

There’s a lot to like about Media Temple hosting. They have transparent pricing, the latest technology, their Grid system, and lots of nice managed features.

BUT, their real-world performance didn’t impress us. While certainly not horrible, we’re not sure Media Temple’s performance can justify its heftier price tag.

We leave this decision up to you:

If you’re willing to pay a bit more for some nice managed features but lackluster performance (for the price), Media Temple isn’t a bad option. Otherwise, you might want to consider someone else.

No matter what, you get a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can try Media Temple at no risk to yourself.