I'm a long-time Media Temple customer, I purchased my first Grid Service hosting in 2009 after a lot of research I have done: reading reviews, talking to other Media Temple customers, etc. In the last 6 years, I am very happy with their hosting service and I will stay with them in the future. After been acquired by Godaddy, Media Temple has released several kinds of services for non-tech customers, such as Cloud Tech, Site Mover, Managed VPS hosting. Last year, Media Temple released Premium Managed WordPress hosting, after about one year in beta, the official version released about two months ago. Based on about one month of independently testing, here is my comprehensive reviews of Media Temple's Managed WordPress hosting.
In the beginning, I want to make it clear that I am trying to make this review short, I will focus on my personal experiences of managed WordPres hosting, If you want to find more information about their products, please check it on their website.
Stability
Why I talk stability first? The reason is that stability is not only the key reason to choose a good web host, but also it is a big concern why you may not choose Media Temple WordPress hosting.
I occured several stability issues in half a month, just several hours after I purchased, my site got a 500 error, support staff said there is something wrong with Grid network (Media Temple's WordPress hosting structure is similiar to Grid Service, sites are powered by a bunch of balanced servers. ), and it was solved in an hour. Another issue happened about ten days later, and this issue is still there. When I browse site from China, the pages didn't show, the browser shows "loading the page" all the time, if I browse via proxy, the pages show up normally. Once in a while, the pages could show up, and just a minute later, the issue happens again. I am still confused, I could ping the domain and no packages were loss, the phenomenon looks like the server drop the requests from a portion of regions, and didn't response to them.
The above issus cause uptime problem and others may not, but also affect the use experience, for example, backup issues. One day, when I was testing backup and restore function, I didn't say any backup list and I couldn't operate the process. Sometimes, the backup mechanism may not work, I saw a list of backups of one site, and one day was missing.
In one word, Media Temple's WordPress hosting is not stable enough to run productive sites, stability needs to be improved.
Performance
When people talking about how to choose a good web host, or why they host their web sites with a hosting company, performance is always another priority.
I am not a coder and I am not familiar with system optimization, but the performance is pretty good. Thanks to the 4 layer of cache and high performance SSD-equiped servers, I am sure, Media Temple's WordPress hosting sites are the top fastest ones I have ever seen. Compared to a Grid Service hosted WordPress site, managed WordPress hosting site responses much better, pages showed up immediately after you click a link.
Price
There are four plans available, a scale of 400,000 visitors per month to unlimited, the low-end plan only cost $20 for one month, compared to other managed WordPress hosting, it is very cheap. Take WPengine for example, the personal plan costs $29 per month for only one WordPress installation, 25,000 visitors per month and 10GB of storage, while Media Temple provide 400,000 visitors per month, two WordPress installations and 30GB of storage for only $20.
Customer Service
Like other Media Temple products, managed WordPress hosting's customer service is satisfied. During the testing period, I submitted a lot of tickets and asked a lot of questions, the support staff solved most of questions in 10 minutes. I prefer to choose live chat rather than submitting a ticket, submitting a ticket may take several hours to get a response.
Disadvantages
No analysis tools or raw log access
As a managed service, it should comes with an analysis tool, such as awstats, but no. You can use Google Analytics or other online analytics service, but you have to add a small piece of code manually by yourself, it may a little difficult for non-tech consumers. It's a new born service, Media Temple may add more features in feature.
No CDN support
CDN is always used for increasing accessing speed, especially for high-traffic sites, CDN is a standard element. When site grows, CDN is becoming more and more important.
No dedicated IP
It is an shared environment and no support for dedicated IP, If you want to add one, you have to purchase a SSL certificate for $75 per year, only Media Temple's or Godaddy's certificates are compatiable, a third-party SSL certificates are not work with Media Temple's manages WordPress hosting. It is a little expensive while you can buy one from NameCheap for less than $10 per year.
Conclusion
It's only about two month since Media Temple officially released this service, there are still some issues, here is my opinion: wait for another year for Media Temple to improve its service, managed WordPress hosting is a little instable now and it may affect your uptime. But I have to say, for now, the performance is great.
