WordPress, Slow, Mediatemple
These were the terms I typed into Google tonight to try and get some clue about my slow performing WordPress blogs. The results that came back were enlightening: far from being the reputable company I once thought, MediaTemple have become a bit of laughing stock. Why? Overselling.
Mediatemple have been well respected for years for offering well priced, high performance hosting. Many big names in the web development world use them and coupled with the promises of their new Grid Server package, there was much to feel good about. So I signed up with them last July and got my own plot on a GS which promised all sorts of great features, including bandwidth rollover.
It turns out that their technology simply couldn’t cope and while they did spend time and money on trying to fix the issues, they also did a good job of blaming their customers. Although performance wasn’t too bad to start with for my own websites, in the last couple of months it’s got steadily worse.
It was the last straw tonight. The reason that I haven’t updated this blog for a while is because of the slowness of using WordPress. I guess it’s fitting that my first post in a while should explain why. This evening I timed the page loading time of my WordPress Write Post page using the great Firebug and it was over two minutes! In this day and age, especially on my 20Mb broadband package, that is insane—and more importantly, unsustainable.
I’m running a web design business, not simply blogging for fun, so I find it completely unacceptable to have these kinds of issues on what is supposed to be one of the best hosting solutions in the business. I’ve emailed their support asking for the matter to be looked into and resolved, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see what they say.
I don’t have much confidence though. The last time I emailed support, it took them five days to answer and that was over me accidentally locking myself out of my admin panel. Five days to reset my password! Would you put up with that from your web host?
A rhetorical question.
If I don’t get a satisfactory outcome to my support request and if things don’t improve, I shall once again be in the frustrating position of trying to find a reliable, reasonably priced and effective host. Wish me luck. Or better still, please recommend one.