Choosing Your Hosting Service

Overview

Media Temple provides multiple web hosting options for a variety of uses and needs. While all of the services mentioned below are built to host websites, each website carries different needs that are best suited to specific platforms. These variations can often make the difference between a stable, positive hosting experience and a negative one.

This article will help you decide which service best suits your needs and plan for both stability and growth with Media Temple. We want to be your creative and business partners for life, and making sure you are on the right platform is a vital first step

Media Temple Hosting Services

Grid

The Grid is the multi-tool of web hosting. Powerful, expansive, and feature-rich, this service ups the ante on conventional shared hosting by leveraging a distributed server network to provide world-class service. The Grid is built to handle sudden traffic spikes when you make it big, with high-intensity periods being "burst" into dedicated environments as necessary. The Grid is also highly customizable and has three different plans to choose from. As of May 2015, Media Temple is proud to offer three new Grid products to choose from. We took everything that made the Grid the premier hosting service and made it better. The Grid offers industry-standard hardware with a fully managed backend system that no other hosting provider approaches. This is the Grid, designed to cover a wide variety of customer needs.

The Grid is ideal for:

• Small to medium-sized businesses and blogs
• Those running multiple CMS platforms
• Customers with many different domains
• Web designers with a few clients
• All-purpose website needs
• Small to medium sites with occasional traffic surges

3 distinct Grid packages

• Media Temple has been delivering award-winning hosting service since 1998. We used that wealth of experience to design three powerful hosting packages.

Feature Rich

• The Grid has everything you need to get a site online quickly, safely, and with the best tech available. Our intuitive onboarding system will walk you through the setup process in minutes.
• Break something? No worries. 1-Click Restore allows you to revert to a previous automatic backup.
• Need to install WordPress? Drupal? Zen Cart? Our Managed Apps installer has more than 20 of the most popular applications ready to go.
• Security concerns? Media Temple Security has you covered around the clock.

Grid Booster Pack

If you need to expand your resources without changing your plan, you may want to consider a Grid Booster Pack. This pack adds resources to your current plan and is a great option for giving your hosting a boost during a significant or unexpected spike in traffic.

• 10GB SSD Storage
• 1 TB Bandwidth
• +10 Sites
• +10 Databases

Need help deciding?

Managed WordPress

Our Managed WordPress service is designed with one goal in mind: providing the fastest, most reliable WordPress experience in the world. To that end, this product sits an optimized WordPress installation in a unique control panel, behind multiple layers of caching. We handle your software upgrades automatically and automatically removes any plug-ins known to cause site slowness or system issues, resulting in a fast, clean, premium WordPress experience. Managed WordPress also comes with beautiful, unique themes designed by our renowned, experienced designers.

Plans

The Managed WordPress service offers several distinct plans for WordPress sites of all sizes.

• Personal Plan: Includes hosting for 2 sites, 50GB SSD storage, and up to 250,000 visitors per month. Great for smaller blogs, portfolios, and creatives in need of a fast, stable WordPress experience.
• Pro Plan: Includes hosting for 10 sites, 200GB SSD storage, two Google Apps for Work accounts (single-domain), and security/malware scanning and removal for up to 5 sites, with up to 500,000 monthly visitors. The Pro plan is perfect for designers with a few clients or bloggers with multiple WordPress sites.
• Elite Plan: Includes hosting for 50 sites, 500GB SSD storage, five Google Apps for Works accounts (single-domain), and security/malware scanning and removal for up to 10 sites, with up to 2 million monthly visitors. The Elite Plan is ideal for large design firms, agencies, and online media empires that need hosting for multiple high-performance WordPress sites.
• Extended Plam: Includes hosting for 100 sites, 1TB SSD storage, ten Google Apps for Works accounts (single-domain), and security/malware scanning and removal for up to 25 sites, with up to 5 million monthly visitors. The Extended plan is designed for large, very high traffic sites that require lots of storage. 

• Custom Plans: We offer heavily customized WordPress plans for sites with specialized needs. If you need a WordPress solution that isn't listed here, we'd love for you to contact our Sales team to discuss your needs in greater detail.

Managed WordPress is great for anyone using WordPress to tell their story, from small blogs to big companies. This service is often utilized by:

• Artists, Photographers, & Musicians (Personal)
• WordPress bloggers (Personal)
• WordPress developers and members of the WordPress community (Personal through Pro)
• Small businesses running WordPress (Personal through Pro)
• Large creative or media-driven agencies with multiple high-traffic websites (Elite)
• Anyone needing a high-performance, worry-free WordPress experience (All Plans!)

Services included

• Automatic WordPress core & security updates
• Unlimited bandwidth
• SSD storage
• SFTP access
• Staging and development options
• Automatic malware scanning
• Daily snapshot backups
• Unique, beautiful themes handmade by Media Temple.
• Integrated Google Apps accounts (Pro/Elite/Extended plans only).

DV

The DV is Media Temple's business-class VPS product. Suitable for anyone needing precise control, scalability, and substantial power from their hosting environment, the DV includes control panel management powered by a choice of either cPanel/WHM or Plesk software. The DV's unique architecture allows it to seamlessly scale between six levels of resources, all the way up to a fully-dedicated server.

The DV is ideal for:

• Small to large businesses
• Developers with many clients
• Hosting resellers
• Those needing dedicated resources
• Sites requiring PCI compliance or other server-level customization
• Those that need room to grow and scale up or down over time

Services included

• Plesk or cPanel/WHM control panel
• Web and email hosting for up to:
  • Plesk: 100 domains. An Unlimited domains license is also available for $15/month
  • cPanel/WHM: Unlimited domains.
• Root access (as needed)
• Extensive one-click app installations, powered by the Plesk Application Vault or cPanel Application Catalog
• 30GB-600GB of storage (depending on service tier)
• Scale seamlessly between service tiers
• Container-level system management via the Virtuozzo Power Panel
• Security scanning and alerts

Plesk or cPanel?

The DV offers you a choice between Plesk or cPanel/WHM control panel software. We are proud to offer either solution for your server management needs, as both panels offer robust and popular feature sets.

Ultimately, the question of which control panel to choose is one of personal comfort and familiarity. However, there are other factors that may influence your decision based on a specific need. Below are some key differences between an "out of box" DV when running cPanel/WHM or Plesk.

DV Developer

The DV Developer is a self-managed, command-line environment intended for developers and technically advanced users. This service comes with root SSH access and a pre-installed, bare-bones Linux environment in an OS of your choice. With the exception of Linux distro-specific daemons and SSH, all system services and software, including LAMP, are self-installed, customized, configured, and managed by you.

The DV Developer is ideal for:

• Advanced web and software developers
• Customers who prefer to work in a command-line environment
• Those needing maximum control over their hosting environment
• Professional Linux administrators

Services included

• Unlimited domains and email addresses -- You configure the server yourself!
• 20GB-500GB of storage (depending on service tier)
• Choose between Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS
• Root access via SSH
• Scale seamlessly between service tiers
• Container-level system management via the Virtuozzo Power Panel

Dedicated Server

The Dedicated Server line takes the technology of the DV and DV Developer servers to a full-size, single-tenant server. This service has two variants: The DV Dedicated offers our DV server with Plesk control panel management, while the Developer Dedicated service gives you a single-tenant Linux box to build out to your heart's content.

Dedicated Servers are ideal for:

• Large-scale development
• Resellers with many customers
• Major companies
• Large-scale campaigns and complex websites
• Those scaling up from smaller-scale VPS environments

Services included

• Full feature sets of either the DV or DV Developer server, but on a larger-scale, single-tenant server.
• Seamless migration from an existing DV or DV Developer server (like services only)
• Server-level system management via the Virtuozzo Power Panel

In order to seamlessly integrate with our other DV products, Dedicated Servers still run on VPS technology. However, the size of your virtualized "container" is the same as that of your entire server, making the Dedicated Server a fully-dedicated hosting environment.

Fully Managed Hosting

Need a powerful, full-featured VPS or Dedicated server but don't have a dedicated system administrator? We have you covered. Fully Managed Hosting combines the power and flexibility of our DV server with the expert-level premium support of Advanced Support.

Fully Managed Hosting is ideal for:

• "Fire and Forget" projects
• Customers requiring greatest peace of mind
• Advanced or complex sites with monitoring and administrative needs
• Everyone else!

Services included

• Advanced Support
• Daily automated backup and recovery
• Plesk or cPanel control panel
• Web and email hosting for 100 domains
  • An Unlimited domains license is also available for $15/month
• Plesk Application Vault apps
• 30GB-600GB of storage (depending on service tier)
• Scale seamlessly between service tiers
• Container-level system management via the Virtuozzo Power Panel
• Comprehensive uptime and resource monitoring
• Security scanning, alerts, and cleanup.

Media Temple Service Comparison Chart