one digital life

Moving one digital life, part I:
Why I ditched LunarPages

I’ve already mentioned recently that I moved one digital life over to a new web host, MediaTemple. I thought I would use the first part of this story to kind of recap what happened that forced the move.

Late in the evening, on August 2nd, I posted some pictures I took of the banners that went up over at the Moscone Center, for Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. With all the speculation that goes on around this time of year, I assumed they would be popular, but I had no idea just how popular they would be. I posted the images just before midnight, and by 5:00am, the site was down.

Overnight, the post was featured on digg.com, and subsequently picked up by many other big name sites, like Engadget, Gizmado, TUAW, AppleInsider, Cult of Mac, etc… All of a sudden, tens of thousands of people were all trying to come to my site at once. At 5:00am, my host, LunarPages, pulled the plug on my account, for excessive php processing. They said the load was going to crash the shared server I was on.

I was a little annoyed that they killed my account without so much as a warning, but I tried to understand the position they were in. What annoyed me the most wasn’t that they turned off my site, it was that they totally took down my account. I couldn’t even get my email. I thought this was a bit of an over reaction. They had plenty of other options besides turning EVERYTHING off.

At this point in the story, I’ve actually written, and re-written what came next several times, in an attempt to accurately portray the series of events, and express my level of frustration with the LunarPages support staff. Each time I write it, it turns into an incredibly long post that no one would ever want to spend the time to read. So, I’m going to leave it at this… In just 2 days, the LunarPages support staff managed to piss me off so bad, that I cancelled an account I’ve had with them for 2.5 years. In the end, it was not the quality or price of their product, but the extreme level of incompetents of their support personal that forced me to look for other hosting options.

In part II of this story I’ll be talking about why I chose MediaTemple as my new host, and what affect it’s had on my site.

3 Comments to Moving one digital life, part I:
Why I ditched LunarPages

1. Shared hosting can be a real big pain. There are exceptions however few and far between.
oc2 on August 9th, 2006

2. I’d say the two things (mt) has going for it are stability and customer care. They really seem to have a great staff who don’t treat their customers like idiots. I think that’s what makes people so happy with them, even though they offer fewer features for the same cash. If hosting with most companies is, in terms of customer service, like going to McDonalds for dinner, hosting with mediatemple is like going to that small Italian joint on the corner that the tourists don’t know about and where the staff is glad to see you. At least, that’s been my experience.

   And, like you, I’m dying for the 6.0 stuff to roll out. You nail the shortcomings of php safe mode and their odd multi-hosting setup in your other post. Those are problematic. And I’m glad to see them going away. And soon, I hope…
wheat on August 10th, 2006

3. [...] A few months ago I ended up on digg.com, and had a sudden increase of traffic. In order to prevent my site from crashing the server, my host deactivated my account. Theoretically, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen under the Grid-Server, because it is supposed to be able to absorb those sudden spikes in traffic, without adversely affecting anyone else’s site. We’ll see if that is really the case. [...]
one digital life » Blog Archive » Migrating from Media Temple’s Shared-Server (ss) to Grid-Server (gs): part I on October 29th, 2006

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