The TextDrive Test Drive
After testing out their hosting for two months, I have cancelled my TextDrive account. I am obviously not going to continue with their services.
First reason: The control panel is not intuitive. It is just text, links, and long-winded forms. According to some people in their forum, they have been promising a custom in-house control panel for at least a year now. I think they need it. Their Knowledge Base was helpful enough to get me playing with Rails, but it was a time-consuming process.
Second reason: LightTPD would go down. Sure, they have you set up a Cron job so LightTPD and your Rails app will restart if their server is rebooted, but I visited my site twice in the same week to find it just hanging. So I would SSH into my account to check the processes. Of course, LightTPD would not be in the list. I would manually run the script to start it back up and my site would be back up in no time. What am I supposed to do? Babysit my site?
Third reason: Steep prices. I know we had a nice table for you to look at last time that showed how great of a deal we were getting, but come on, I’d like to retire in 35 years. Don’t worry… I’ve got another table for you to look at soon.
So what did I do? I signed up for a Media Temple account. I had a conversation with some of the guys there last month and they seemed to have a great new hosting solution almost ready for release. So I thought I would wait for them to switch over to this new hosting and then migrate over to (mt).
I waited. My TextDrive account was going to expire. I wanted hosting so I could at least use it to stage the index page (a placeholder) for my other domain. So now I am a proud owner of some (mt) hosting. So far I have had no problems.
Media Temple informed me that the new hosting plans will take effect in 2-3 weeks. At that time, the storage and bandwidth will grow significantly. They will also begin supporting Ruby on Rails along with some other great things.
Media Temple vs. TextDrive
| Hosting (as of June 20th) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | Price | Storage | Bandwidth | DBs | TLDs | Setup Fee |
| Media Temple (ss) Professional | $12.95/month | 2GB | 1TB | 5 | 5 | n/a |
| TextDrive Shared 2 | $25.00/month | 2GB | 10GB | 20 | 10 | $25 |
| Media Temple (ss) Advanced | $19.95/month | 5GB | 1.5TB | 20 | 20 | n/a |
| TextDrive Shared 3 | $40.00/month | 3GB | 40GB | 40 | 20 | $25 |
| Hosting (after new Media Temple plan takes effect) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | Price | Storage | Bandwidth | DBs | TLDs | Setup Fee |
| Media Temple (ss) Professional | $12.95/month | 10GB | 1TB+ | 5? | 5? | n/a |
| TextDrive Business 2 | $100.00/month | 10GB | 100GB | 30 | 5 | $25 |
| Media Temple (ss) Advanced | $19.95/month | 20GB | 1.5TB+ | 20? | 20? | n/a |
| TextDrive Business 3 | $200.00/month | 20GB | 200GB | 30 | 10 | $50 |
Going With The Pre-paid Offer
Media Temple offers the ability to pre-pay 3 months, 1 year, or 2 years, resulting in discounts to your bill. I was feeling saucy and went with 2 years pre-paid. Let’s do some math! Um, I mean, I will do the math, you can take a look at the results.
Hosting (as of June 20th)
Media Temple (ss) Professional for 2 years: $190.80
TextDrive Shared 2 for 2 years: $625.00
Hosting (after new Media Temple plan takes effect)
Media Temple (ss) Professional for 2 years: $190.80
TextDrive Business 2 for 2 years: $2425.00
TextDrive Three Martini Lunch for life: $1399.00
Okay, okay. So I put the lifetime hosting in there for kicks. But for the lifetime price to be worth it, I would have to host my site at Media Temple for a little over 7 years, pre-paying every 2 years and assuming (mt) doesn’t increase their prices.
I hope these tables plus the previous post have given you some ideas about two popular hosting providers. Discussing how well Media Temple hosting is working out for me will have to wait for another post.
Comments
What is your analysis now that MT has moved to the GridServer plan? $20 per month?
Posted by: Mike | July 24, 2007 10:57 AM
I moved to MT because of their Rails setup. Since I've given up on Rails and gone back to PHP, my sites have moved back to ASO. I have a lifetime account there. $20/month was not worth it at MT, especially since I was experiencing drops in service during the day.
Posted by: Mark | July 24, 2007 11:13 AM