Agnivo Roy

MediaTemple (mt) recently launched their Grid-Server (gs) hosting which, theoretically (and practically ?) should impose a serious blow to traditional shared hosting concept. Instead of the conventional shared or clustered hosting, (mt) has decided to implement Grid-Server, a completely new hosting platform that replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. They claim to eliminate roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email, unlike hosting 100s of accounts on single dedicated servers. The Grid’s on-demand scalability means you’ll always be ready for intense bursts of traffic and the growing audience resulting from your online success. All of this enormous power, controlled through their brand new AccountCenter, is available for a reasonable price of $20/month. ( wow ?)

(gs) Plan Specifications :

• 100 GBs of premium storage.
• 1 TB of short-path bandwidth.
• Host up to 100 unique domains.
• 64 MB Ruby/Mongrel container.
• Choice of PHP4 / PHP5.
• 1000 email accounts.
• 100 databases.
• SSH Access.

Concept of GPU and Grid Resource Usage

So, there’s no fear of getting your domain suspended, as done by most shared hosts for excess cpu usage or exceeding daily bandwidth limit, if you are with (gs). (mt) measures cpu and resource usage in GPUs. As websites are no longer tied to an individual server, you gain access to the resources of an ever expanding grid computing system. Each (gs) Grid-Server hosting plan includes a large number of Grid Performance Units or GPUs. If you exceed the limit, you are just billed 10 cents per extra GPU.

The grid grows alongwith the customers. If the number of customers ( and load ) on the grid increases, (mt) just adds new boxes to the grid. They also claim to have low latency internal networks on fibre-channels.

Advantages of Grid over Traditional Shared Hosting

• No inconsistent performance commonly known as the “bad neighbor effect”, due to huge traffic bursts or spiked resource usage or load on any domain on the grid.
• You’ll never outgrow the Grid Server because new hardware can be added at anytime to increase hosting capacity.
• The Grid Server has been designed to withstand numerous hardware and software failures without impacting any aspect of your online operations, thus having great redundancy.
• Intelligent load balancing and failover - something that traditional shared and clustered failover systems can’t offer you.
• Grid can handle huge temporary traffic and resource usage spikes - theoretically it should be able to bear the load of a front page Digg without noticeable slowing…! Seems like a mini Google cluster, eh ?

Current Shortcomings

(mt) claims to have developed this system in-house since the last 1year. It is not worth the debate whether they are using common open-source solutions in a different way or configuration. Like every new system, (mt) needs some time to tune it up optimally and plug loopholes. Its still too early to comment whether this new platform is any good than traditional platforms. ( although Mosso, a sister concern of Rackspace Managed Hosting provides a similar solution at 5x the price ).

I was browsing the WHT forums yesterday and came upon some (mt)(gs) threads. Here’s a current summary of peoples’ views there (some of them signed up) :

• Their tech-support is taking huge time to respond or not at all. (Too many new customers in a short span of time ?)
• Dynamic pages (php) seem to load a bit slower than normal shared hosting. (fractions, hardly matter)
• Intermittent downtime for some domains. (when contacted, they are taking steps and asking for detailed info though)
• Older Shared Server (ss) clients are automatically being migrated to a Lite version of (gs), price ($7.95) being kept the same.
• Only one database user is allowed currently.
• A single control panel is currently available. A reseller option is coming soon which can give you individual control panels for domains like cPanel/WHM.
• No option to add extra dedicated IPs currently. That means a single e-commerce site (with SSL) can be hosted on an account.

Overall Impressions

Accordint to (mt), they are in business since 1998, an industry-leading, privately held, profitable web hosting and software application services company based in Los Angeles, California. They claim to have high-profile clients like - Starbucks Coffee, L’Oreal, Sony, etc using their advanced hosting solutions.

Their implementation of this so called “revolutionary platform” is worthy or praise, which would surely bring something new in the traditional hosting industry. Some people argue that its basically the same old clustering concept with some additives and branding gimmick.

Only time will tell the fate of the (gs) from (mt). As I had said previously, it’s still too early to comment, as the thing is just months old. Early teeting problems are inevitable, as seen from the feedbacks of a few users at the WHT.

Also their generous space and bandwidth allocations may seem to be like the old overselling story. But guys, this is like a mini supercomputing grid, not a small single server. So there are oodles of storage and bandwidth that they can afford. Storage should be vast and a seperate cluster of SANs…!

I think their effort is worth applauding. Hope it brings some real and noticeable change in the monotonous shared hosting market…ridden with outrageous overselling, perilous server loads and unimaginable number of accounts packed into weak servers. It’s worth trying their plan, but I’d suggest you to wait for sometime, let it mature and let their guys optimize their grid to the max.

Lastly, I’m in no way affiliated with (mt). I found this really interesting yesterday while browsing and just posted a sort of summany as far as my little experience and knowledge goes… Many thanks for reading this post.

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