Editors (mt) Media Temple Review

Media Temple Review (Page 1)

Media Temple has its sights set on the web design community. Their ultra-modern, ultra-clean website is part hosting company, part art gallery. Large futuristic murals adorn every page making a visit to Media Temple feel like a trip to New York's Guggenheim. It's easy to forget that Media Temple is in fact a web hosting company, serving over 40,000 customers.

Media Temple's product line is minimal, with just two shared hosting plans on display. We opted to review their advertised $7.95 per month (actually $12.95 per month unless you pay for 2 years up front) (ss) Professional package, which includes 2GB of storage space, 30GB of rollover bandwidth and the ability to host up to 5 websites.

Signup was relatively painless, although we were surprised to learn that their e-mail spam filtering (MailProtect) costs an additional $4.95 per month. Not only is spam filtering available for free with every "free" email service (ie. Hotmail), but spam filtering is also standard fare at every other large hosting company. It seems ludicrous that Media Temple would charge extra to block junk mail that their servers should never have accepted in the first place.

Other add-ons include Moveable Type (a blogging solution), Miva Merchant (an e-commerce storefront) and the Macromedia Flash MX server. Luckily most adept web designers can get away without having to pay for any of these upgrades. There are many great open source e-commerce and blogging applications available that are absolutely free and will work just fine with Media Temple.

On the flipside we were pleased to find that Urchin website statistics and a dedicated IP address were included at no additional cost (typically add-ons with other web hosting companies). In fact most web designers would agree that these two features alone are worth the price of admission.

The (ss) in Media Temple's hosting line stands for Shared Server 4.0. This is an easy to digest marketing term for the underlying technology powering their web hosting plans. While it is advertised as "new" we found that several components are actually quite dated. If you are looking to run PHP 5, or scripts that require MySQL 4.x (database), Media Temple's Shared Server 4.0 won't cut it. For many cutting edge web designers this may be a deal breaker.

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