Media Temple Review: Pricey Hosting But Here’s Why it Might Pay Off for You

Digital.com’s Rating for Media Temple

Our Editor’s rated Media Temple 3 / 5 based on user ratings, pricing, and features offered.

Media Temple: Quick Overview

Media Temple is one of the big players in web hosting. They host 1.5 million websites for 125,000 members. Their mission is “to help web developers, designers, digital entrepreneurs, and innovators bring their ideas to life online.”

Media Temple invented a unique clustered architecture of servers called “The Grid” which is designed to improve speed and uptime for shared hosting. The Grid also allows for quick setup and easier scalability — which is critical if your site takes off.

What Are the Pros & Cons of Media Temple?

So is Media Temple any good? Here’s a quick summary.

What Makes Media Temple Stand Out?

Media Temple’s hosting plans aren’t the cheapest, but the value isn’t composed solely of dollars and cents.

The additional cost manifests itself through outstanding customer support; their employees spend 90% of their time helping customers.

Media Temple is also worth checking out because they’ll review your website for free and recommend improvements.

On the business side, Media Temple offers Linux-based VPS hosting and an OpenStack-powered private cloud service called Helix.

If you choose to go with Media Temple, you’ll be in good company — Samsung, CBS, and Obey are some of their prominent clients.

Media Temple Hosting Types

Media Temple has plans for hobbyists, small businesses, and enterprises.

The emphasis on top performance in all these plans is what sets Media Temple apart.

Shared Hosting: It’s Managed and Low-Cost

There are three shared Grid plans, each with its own variables and similarities. Shared hosting means you are sharing server space with other websites. This tends to be the most affordable type of hosting for small businesses.

Media Temple’s shared hosting plans include:

1. The Grid experts manage everything for you.
2. Clustered servers for superior performance.
3. 30-day automatic backups.
4. SSD (solid-state drive) storage for greater speed and reliability.
5. Fast page loading.
6. Bonus up to nine free months of hosting when you pay for 1, 2 or 3 years upfront.
7. DDoS and intrusion protection.
8. Security: Malware alerts and a tool to remove them.
9. Global CDN – a content delivery network that speeds up your site loading. (Available on the “Pro” and “Elite” plans)
10. Advanced security and firewall by Sucuri. (Available on the “Pro” and “Elite” plans)

VPS Hosting Options: Managed and Unmanaged

VPS (virtual private server) hosting is a mid-level hosting option. It offers some of the affordability of shared hosting along with the control and scaling options growing small businesses need.

Media Temple offers three VPS hosting plans: fully managed, partly managed, or managing it all yourself. This option is convenient for small businesses who want dedicated or a less crowded server due to lots of daily visitors.

VPS hosting plans include everything that’s offered in the shared plans and more:

• Fast, reliable SSD (solid-state servers)
• 99.99% uptime
• Instant scaling as needed
• Automatic backups
• Choose from Command line or Control panel VPS hosting
• Choose whether you want to manage your site yourself or have it managed for you
• Choice of the operating system: Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS
• Choice of control panels: Plesk, cPanel, or WHM
• Full root access
• Performance and security scans

What’s Included with Managed VPS?

You’ll get the following services if you opt for a managed VPS plan:

• Onboarding consultation and analysis of needs
• Migration of your site from another web host
• Install and configure the operating system and any needed apps and plugins
• 24/7/364 priority service “hotline“
• Installation of new software
• Stress-tests of your website
• Optimization of your server
• Your site pages and database are continually scanned for SQL injections, malware, cross-site scripting, SEO spam, and other important security threats
• WAF (Web Application Firewall).

Dedicated Hosting Options

Dedicated servers are best for large websites or those with heavy daily traffic. With a dedicated server, you won’t be sharing server space with other sites. This does, however, come at a premium cost. Most small businesses won’t need this level of hosting, but it is nice to know you won’t have to change hosts as your site grows.

Media Temple offers three dedicated hosting options according to your skill level. Manage it all yourself, half-manage it or let a Media Temple expert do it all for you.

• You’ll get everything the other plans offer plus much more.
• Your own server is the ideal choice if your business is thriving, has tons of daily visitors and other plans can’t cope with your needs.
• Pre-installed software (varies according to which plan you choose).
• Your choice of control panels.

Hosting Optimized for WordPress

Media Temple has plans created specifically for WordPress, which is great news for WP users.

Choose from two plans (Personal and Pro) based on the number of sites you need and your traffic level. Personal allows you to host two sites, while the Pro plan allows for hosting up to 10 sites.

Media Temple WordPress hosting features include:

• Easy migration
• Two staging environments per site (so you can test before sending changes live)
• Tons of dev tools – Git version control, WP-CLI, phpMyAdmin access, etc.
• Access to WP themes – some with included stock photography
• 30-day back up and restore
• 24/7 support
• Automatic updates
• Security monitoring

Media Temple Plans & Prices

Media Temple has a range of premium web hosting solutions on offer; from shared, VPS (managed and self-managed) and dedicated (managed and self-managed) servers, to cloud and WordPress hosting. Here below is an overview of their plans and current price list. For the latest and most up-to-date prices visit Media Temple’s website.

Try Media Temple. 30-day money-back guarantee.

Features Included With Media Temple Plan

Here are the main features of Media Temple web hosting plans:

• 24/7/365 support. Premium support (for a fee).
• High-performance solid-state drives (SSD) come with every plan for increased reliability and performance (great for small businesses that can’t afford downtime!)
• Migrating sites from other providers (for a fee due to their custom control panel).
• Free front-end site review to uncover potential problems.
• Free one-click script installer solely for Drupal, WordPress, and Zen Cart. However, manual installs can be done on virtually everything you need.
• Disaster recovery/restoration support (for a fee).
• Have your whole site managed by an expert at Media Temple (for a fee).
• SSL certificate. If you need it installed, it will incur a fee.
• Unlimited data transfers, which means you don’t need to worry about bandwidth.
• Secure local backups (for a fee). It’s essential you also do your own backups.
• Emergency clean-up of malware and removing your name from blacklists (a monthly fee).
• If you want to be proactive and have your regular monitoring, clean-ups and more, it will incur a monthly fee, but it may save trouble down the track.
• Free domain is included.
• Add-on email with GSuite for just $5. Easy to set up and MT provides an installation tool.
• 30-day file backup & restore.
• Secure malware alert and removal tool.
• DDoS & intrusion protection.

How Is Media Temple Performance and Uptime?

“The Grid” — Media Temple’s Solution for Speed and Scalability

Media Temple designed and built “the Grid,” one of the first public clouds ever created.

Its unique design provides more speed, reliability, and scalability.

Their Secret Sauce: Clustered Servers

One of their secrets is the use of what are called “clustered servers.”

This architecture can easily handle large spikes in traffic by hosting your site across numerous servers.

The Grid doesn’t slow down or crash when you’re hit with a large number of extra visitors all at once. That’s important because you don’t want your site to crash when you’re covered on the news, do a radio interview, or are advertising on Facebook for traffic.

How is Media Temple’s Solution Different?

It’s different because other companies check what % of CPU resources you’re using. If you use more than a certain amount for a specified time period, they’ll shut your site down. That’s the worst thing to happen as you’re building momentum and it may cost you lots of money.

GPUs, not CPUs

Media Temple calculates GPUs instead. These are “Graphics Processing Units.”

You’re given 2000 GPUs, to begin with.

If you have spikes, it doesn’t matter, providing you stay inside the GPU limit. (More than ample for most business sites.) If you use more, you’ll be billed for it but your site will stay up.

Does MediaTemple Handle Site Backups?

 Media Temple offers the Snapshot Backup that preserves the entire state of your server, from the core configuration files down to the emails. It keeps an off-server backup in Media Temple’s secure Data Center in case your machine gets hacked or becomes corrupted and makes a new backup weekly or monthly so your data stays current.

This includes customizations to the server configuration, all Plesk data, domains, emails, databases – every single file on the server. It lets you roll back to an earlier server state, should you have no other available backups of critical data. Their Snapshot Backup allows you to pick and choose what files get restored. Or, you can roll the entire server back to its exact state at the time of the backup.

The downside of this feature is you do need to manually click it to make a backup and scheduling automated backups are not available.  Due to the large size of these backups (ranging anywhere from 4 GB to 60 GB), they cannot be sent to you. They can only be recovered through Plesk and are not available for direct download. It requires additional cost. You can hold multiple backups, up to 5, by purchasing additional slots. Each slot costs $20 monthly.

How Does Media Temple Keep Your Site Secure?

Media Temple works hand-in-hand with Sucuri to protect your sites with an intuitive, comprehensive security tool and team. Their security services include:

• Unlimited malware removal
  When trouble arrives, rest assured the Sucuri team has your back. They will do whatever it takes to repair your website.
• Continuous scans
  Your site’s always under watch for malware, cross-site scripting, SQL injections, SEO spam, and other issues.
• Instant alerts
  You will be notified the minute a problem is detected. You can set up alerts through email, SMS, Slack, and more.
• Extensive dashboard
  Stop by for a quick status check or manually tune dozens of security settings from your security dashboard.

How Is Media Temples’ Help and Support?

• 24/7/365 support via phone, live chat, email tickets, Facebook and Twitter support, access to a knowledgebase of questions and answers and much more.
• Support staff spend 90% of their working time helping customers.

Money-back Guarantee

• 30-day money-back guarantee.
• 99.999% uptime guarantee.
• The VPS plans are also called DV products. Media Temple offers a 99.999% uptime guarantee on these plans, and if you have downtime, you’ll get a 20% refund on your hosting for that month. Calculated on every 20 mins of downtime you had for the month.