Switching servers was not an easy decision to come to. I was happy with the last company I was with. The service was cheap and the support was great. Hell, I had the guys cell phone number if I had any questions.

After some minor issues with the multiple sites I run and a influx of new visitors, I used up my monthly bandwidth in a matter of days. Instead of upgrading my account and paying more money, I thought I would take a look for a new hosting service that was inexpensive and was easy to use.

Welcome to Media Temple.

Photo credit
I asked some people that ran their own blogs and I heard many different hosting companies to look at. Each had their own pros and cons. In the end, I took the advice of an online friend that recently switched their site that gets about 50K hits a day to Media Temple and said that they couldn’t be happier. I could only dream that I could get that type of expose some day.

Setting up the account at Media Temple was easy. I went with the Grid Service (gs)

What do I get with a (gs) Grid-Service plan?

• 100 GBs of premium storage
• 1 TB of short-path bandwidth
• 100 unique sites / alternate domains
• 64MB Ruby/Mongrel container
• 1,000 GPUs
• 100 databases
• 1,000 email addresses

For $20.00 a month, that’s a lot of stuff. I was paying a little more than that for less than half the unique domains. I was having to do some creative forwarding of the DNS to get all of my domains to appear as if they were on their own.

Media Temple on the iPhone
What could be better than getting a great hosting plan? Having a hosting plan that you can access from your iPhone. The features are a bit limited but you have access to go to the regular account center for all of the features.

Moving the data across serevers is a long and meticulous process. Thankfully most of the sites were on the WordPress platform and they make it easy to export all of the posts and data. The issues ran into the transfer of themes and plugins. Sounds easy enough but when you have to do this with 20 sites, making sure each goes to the right place and doesn’t overwrite anything is key.

Switching Webservers

This site is now all moved over and my other primary sites have been moved as well. Doing this made me realize that their are several domains that I really don’t care about and I decided to not move them over. The domains will be expiring soon and I will not be renewing them. Between my job and the 4 primary sites I manage, I do not have much time to do much else. I will throw up some landing pages on the domains not set to expire for a while. There are about 40 of those. (Yes, I have too many domains) BANs would be an option but I don’t know.

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