I had to leave Media Temple’s grid service hosting and upgrade to a dedicated box. Normally I would be outraged at the host and demand all of my money back and blah blah blah. Time is sensitive and it took them less than 30 minutes to provision a CentOS 5 box fully configured and ready to host. I don’t understand why the host.conf file in Plesk can’t come with .htaccess override turned on. It’s a pretty phuking standard option. That’s for a different rant, I must not digress.

I had to leave the grid because something wasn’t right. The site would take almost 20 seconds to load. I ran a tracert and it hit all of the hops in milliseconds. Perhaps something was wrong in the DNS Zone file? Or maybe, just maybe, the magical grid is just slow. It’s being taxed. It’s being raped by other sites and applications. The grid is being taxed and raped and my site is unfortunate victim.

San Fransisco based Servepath has just released their Grid. To combat all the taxing and raping (this is San Fran) they are allowing you deploy as many servers on the grid as needed. You can downgrade during off hours and upgrade to a cluster of 8 virtually dedicated servers on the grid. Their service also allows for the allocation of dedicated IPs. The only slight problem, it’s slightly pricey. You pay per CPU hours, per RAM hours and bandwidth. I ran the numbers and even with 1 server and not 1k of traffic, you are paying $150 a month. For sites that expect tremendous spikes in traffic (Shoebacca I am looking your way) but don’t need a cluster of 8 Quad cores and 2 load balancers, this is for you.

So moral of the story, Media Temple, phuk your taxing and raping slow as phuk, grid!