If you checked the site at any time last week then there was a 20% chance that it was down. Some­how, over the last few months, we had begun to hit the resource limit at Medi­aTemple. No real traffic changes, no server changes, just a slow decline in the sta­bil­ity and speed of our VPS. Open­ing a ticket with Media Temple revealed that because we had been with them for longer than 2 years, we were on a quite out­dated ver­sion, and were offered a free upgrade to the cur­rent ver­sion. How­ever, because we had such an old ver­sion of their DV server — we could not use their auto­matic upgrade tools and would have to open a new server with them (at a min­imum of $50 a month) to migrate. As this happened halfway through our yearly billing cycle (paid upfront) I decided to wait it out.

It all came to a head last week when the site went down com­pletely. Frantic requests to Media Temple (over a period of 24 hours) ended in a response of “If issues per­sists, we can only sug­gest either adding addtional RAM or upgrad­ing your server. We’ve determ­ined the root cause and have helped you optim­ize your server as a courtesy.”

When the sup­port staff still can’t tell you why you server is per­form­ing so badly with no changes, and deem it a cour­tesy to keep it run­ning, you know it’s time to move on. So good­bye Media Temple, and hello Linode! I signed up to the base plan — less than half the price I was pay­ing at Media Temple — and got to migrat­ing all my data. There will be a post com­ing up about all the pit­falls involved in mov­ing from one host­ing com­pany to another, as well as tips and tricks to set up your fresh server.