June 8th, 2009
Developers Love Flowers (Even the Guys!)
I received a wonderful gift today, flowers! My favorite client, Abaxis, surprised me with a beautiful vase of flowers for my desk. What a great way to start off the week. Thanks to everyone at Abaxis, especially, Valerie, Elyse, and Jennifer.
Flowers From Abaxis!
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October 9th, 2008
(mt) Media Temple Relocation
We’re big on standardization because it helps us to squeeze every last drop of productivity from each task that we complete. Naturally, hosting providers are a prime opportunity for process improvements and we’ve been reluctant to switch hosting providers until there’s a really solid set of benefits that we’ll see when working on website maintenance tasks for our clients.
Some of the providers we’ve used in the past include: Sirius, Best Internet, Interland, Hostway, and Dreamhost. All of these providers have served their purposes well and depending on the time period, some were stellar and others were less so.
Our newest hosting provider is (mt) Media Temple and we’ve decided to go with their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual plan for our own site as well as our client’s sites.
We’re switching to (mt) because they have built a solid reputation as a stable provider with great support, a great control panel (Account Center), Plesk for hosting control (love it or hate it), access to a lot of developer tools, including make, curl, subversion (svn), and root access if you really think you need it.
The migration to Media Temple has been smooth thus far. We evaluated the (gs) Grid-Service plan and although the control panel is really nice we opted for the Dedicated-Virtual plan because the database access was available via localhost. This detail makes a big difference for WordPress and Drupal based sites and is well worth the extra expense. A number of our client sites have been relocated already and we’re close to completing the transfer of all out internal sites to Media Temple as well.
Previously we had been recommending DreamHost, I love their control panel, the ability to configure independent multi-site environments with sandboxed user permissions, access to svn binaries via ssh for deployment and rollbacks. Unfortunately, their lack of telephone support (I’m still waiting for a callback from months ago), poor reputation, and loosely maintained status blog eventually became deal-breakers.
I’ve noticed that we’re in good company at Media Temple and look forward to a long productive stay at our new hosting provider.
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