(mt) and (gs)

The folks over at MediaTemple have sent the webhosting world into a tizzy by introducing a completely new concept in shared hosting.

Let me rephrase that: by introducing a completely new concept in shared hosting that costs less than $20 a month. Actually, that’s a misnomer—MediaTemple’s new “Grid-Server” isn’t really shared hosting at all, because it isn’t comprised of a bunch of separate boxes, each with X number of accounts on each.

Here, look at their marketing spiel:

(mt) Media Temple’s Grid-Server is a completely new hosting platform that replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. We’ve eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email. The Grid’s on-demand scalability means you’ll always be ready for intense bursts of traffic and the growing audience resulting from your online success.

In other words, they’ve got a fast SAN hooked to a cluster of web servers and application servers. So each account is technically box-neutral, all using the same shared resource. This way, ideally, there will be less waste (in unused resources) and less downtime (in overtaxed boxes). Of course, it’s brand new, so only time will tell how well it scales. And they naturally have to squash all the bugs that scurried out of hiding during the rollout.

I’ve been reading about this new service with much salivation. Dreamhost has been iffy lately, but I’m hooked until July 2007, so they have until then to improve their service, or I just might migrate to MediaTemple at that point.

But one thing which continues to irk me is the lack of solid details about the service. I get the marketing spiel, I get the rhetoric, and I get the basic specs (MySQL 4 and PostgreSQL 7, up to 1000 databases, PHP 4 & 5, RoR with Mongrel, 100GB storage, 1TB bandwidth, 1’000 GPU [processing resources]), and I see the screenshots of their control panels, but there are still a few things I would like to know that don’t appear to be in their literature.

1. They hype up this new AJAXified webmail, but I’ve yet to actually see it. Is it home-grown? @Mail? RoundCube? This is especially vexing to me, as I despise SquirrelMail and am very interested in what (mt) is running now, but I can’t find any screenshots.
2. Do they have SSL/TLS for IMAP/POP3/SMTP?
3. How quickly can we expect new applications to be added to the one-click installs?

On the whole, I’m really excited about this: it seems like a pretty great new service, so long as the “Grid” layout doesn’t hose too many applications (it doesn’t seem to, except for Django—sorry, Python-lovers), and its performance stays as good as it promises.

Kudos, (mt). Maybe I’ll be seeing you.