Update: This is an old archived post on this site and is only kept online for my own archival purposes. The content and images on this post this might be outdated and incomplete. Please do not sue me if the Internet breaks because you read this.

I fell in love with the grid (gs) back when I signed up and up to the last minute. It was easy for me to ignore the issues with loading times, downtime and other problems as I was one happy customer. Mediatemple is family, but you just can’t stay at home for the rest of your life.

Before this article was written, Archon Digital took eons to fully load which I find to be really frustrating a lot of times. It has been on a Mediatemple Grid Server ever since the domain was bought in January 2007 and moving away from their lovely control panel was like moving away from home for the first time.

Evolution by Choice

As far as I can tell, I’ve already outgrown the Grid. I’ve outgrown not the capability and limitations of the system, but more on what else I can do and learn from it. I craved for root access and the freedom of being able to fully configure my own server.

The next step was definitely going to be a VPS for me and back then I was choosing between Mediatemple‘s DV hosting and Slicehost VPS. The decision was made early last week, where I concluded that learning how to setup my own box from scratchwould be more beneficial to me in the long run.

I enjoyed using Mediatemple’s Grid Server (gs) hosting and have had good experience with their tech support and all their friendly staff as well. While there were indeed numerous outages, I still consider Mediatemple a great hosting company and their upcoming Cluster Server (cs) will most probably a better successor to the Grid.

Other problems I encountered with the Grid were related to certain TXT DNS entries which I badly need for domainkeys and others to work. Those who regularly visit my site can probably tell the difference on how much the loading time has improved. From a previous 1.0 to 8.0 seconds to a speedy 0.56 seconds

Why Not Shared?

You really can’t make me go back to shared hosting. I have nothing against it as it works real well for a lot of people, but I really feel more like I’ve outgrown it long ago. Even tried reseller hosting for a few sites last year but to me it’s still just shared hosting with a few added perks.

I also run a few other sites that require more resources and you would probably hate to be my neighbor in a shared hosting box.

What Next?

So that’s about it. I just need to transfer a few sites off to another hosting account and will then officially close my grid server account. I have documented how I set up my NGINX setup and compiled most of the information on a new article which will be posted here soon.