Dreamhost woes, MediaTemple heroes.
About a month or so ago Dreamhost, my hosting company, fell into a dark hole for more than a few days. It wrecked havoc! For me personally, this wasn’t so much of a problem albeit really annoying. However it was my playground for testing, and when you’re webcentric, well - your fucked. The worst part of the experience was recommending them for our company blog, widgify, for reasons which always rule the business world, money. It was dirt cheap.
However when the pressure was on, Dreamhost didn’t do so well. And I’m being nice here. When I knew the problem wasn’t going to get resolved (I had waited for a couple of days) plus pressure from work, I switched to MediaTemple’s new grid server. Now I wished I would have stuck it out personally with them as well. The service has just been phenomenal. Everytime I called they answered within minutes.
I had a problem with the MySQL connections to the blog and restore from a dump file. MediaTemple had been having problems with MySQL for a few days before I rejoined, however it was nice to physically talk to someone about those problems (No phone support from Dreamhost even though we paid for call back support). Still connections problems. Finally on a last ditch effort, I sent an sos email to the Director of Marketing, Alex. He personally saw to it that the problem was solved, and it was fixed. The problem was rather embarrasing, it was the wrong environmental call for php to mysql. Yet, still more problems with MySQL. Through ssh I found a pattern in the tables which were a little off. The dump from Dreamhost didn’t exactly sync up. When the tables where fixed the blog went up. It was a great feeling, but it felt even better than I can count on the people at MediaTemple for future support.
Personal THANKS! to Alex at MediaTemple.