Jim Goings

I host two sites on Media Temple; this one and my Dungeons and Dragons community site, Dragon Avenue. I have been using them for a few months now and I can say without hesitation two things:

1. Media Temple has some of the slickest features out there.
2. My sites either go down or take over ten seconds to load frequently. By frequently, I mean daily.

I have had a couple of phone calls with their tech support folks, including one manager, who seemed sympathetic but unable to offer any advice on how to address the issue. At first, (mt) seemed to sweep the issue under the rug. Communication was infrequent and it took days (no kidding) to even get a response from tech support (as reported by not just me, but my friends who use them as well).

Now they seem to have taken to apologizing for the outages each time they occur.I recently commented on one of their outage reports, but I don’t expect I’ll hear anything back… at least anything that is tangible. I wonder if they’ll even approve my comments to be revealed to the public. Given that none of their recent blogs have comments, I suspect not.

They still aren’t talking about the slowness at all though. As long as their servers respond to web requests within a minute or so, then all is right with the world in their eyes. Yes, that was a bit of hyperbole, but my points are valid.

I recently opened a ticket with them asking about the outages and even asked if switching to a DV plan would eliminate them:

Support response: 2008/04/01 16:37
This depends on the cause of the issue. I have found a good number of causes for timeouts having to do with external resources being pulled. Now if it is a routing issue, moving to a (dv) would help . One thing that would help us in troubleshooting your issue would be to provide us with trace route results to your server.

Just let us know which path you will want to go.

I replied:

Site is timing out currently at 11:10PM on 4/8/2008. Here is a tracert as requested. As you can see, the issue isn’t network related (at least on the Internet side of things). I should note that this isn’t rare. The site times out often, sometimes many times per day.

I suspect that your servers are over loaded, but that’s just my speculation. Either way, I need to have my site reliably available. Please help.

tracert www.dragonavenue.com

Tracing route to www.dragonavenue.com [64.13.232.65]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms FIOS_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 8 ms 7 ms 6 ms L100.VFTTP-02.PTLDOR.verizon-gni.net [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
3 8 ms 6 ms 7 ms P2-2.LCR-02.PTLDOR.verizon-gni.net [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
4 26 ms 24 ms 24 ms so-6-0-0-0.PEER-RTR1.SJC80.verizon-gni.net [130.81.17.133]
5 24 ms 24 ms 24 ms 130.81.15.26
6 81 ms 32 ms 31 ms avanz.ge3-1.2.cr01.lax03.pccwbtn.net [63.218.91.30]
7 32 ms 32 ms 32 ms cr01-2-2.lax4.net2ez.com [64.93.64.74]
8 33 ms 32 ms 32 ms cust-77.lax4.net2ez.com [64.93.75.14]
9 33 ms 32 ms 31 ms 72.10.63.210
10 33 ms 32 ms 31 ms acmkoiegkq.gs02.gridserver.com [64.13.232.65]

Trace complete.

To ensure that they had as much information as possible, I even provided them with 3rd party verification:

Further verification from monitus that the issue isn’t related to my home network:

** PROBLEM alert - www.dragonavenue.com HTTP PROBLEM **
PROBLEM Alert
Service: HTTP
URL: http://www.dragonavenue.com
Tag: Default
State: CRITICAL
Date/Time: 2008-04-09 06:14:47 GMT

Additional Information: Connection refused.

Get your own monitoring at http://monitis.com
Best regards, monitis team.

Here is their response.

The brief outage you have experienced tonight was due to an outstanding issue we have with our (gs) hardware which you can read more about here:

http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/gs-grid-service-intermittent-service-availability/

The trace route that you posted is exceptional, your problem is not network related. Contrary to what the last technician said, moving to a (dv) hosting plan you would not have these problems anymore. The issues are isolated to our (gs) hosting plan only. If you wish to try out our (dv) package, I can set one up for you with 1 free month so you can check it out. Let me know if you would like to do that and I’ll set that up for you.

Lame. Just lame. No acknowledgment of the fact that the outages occur daily for minutes at a time or the general slowness that is epidemically affecting their two “grids”.

Here is a screenshot of just one page full of alerts from Monitus, a third party monitoring service. Check the dates on the right column. Sad.

Switching hosts is a PITA. In fact, I tried to switch today and ran into some issues around the Apache mod-rewrite rules that make Dragon Avenue work correctly. As such, I bailed out until I can get some help figuring out how to change the rules appropriately. In addition, there is a rumored compatibility issue with Apache 2.x and Expression Engine. I couldn’t find the info on that, but the host I attempted to move to indicated that there was a problem and the fix was a code change.

As I said, switching hosts is a PITA. I can only hope that Media Temple will really fix their issues or that my patience will end and I will be forced to tackle the burden of switching. Sigh.

UPDATE 6/24/2008 - Media Temple claims to have fixed the major issue causing downtime. And it seems they may be right. My site has been up for 3 weeks now without fail. That may not seem like much, but it’s a huge win over the daily outages I was experiencing. I’ll update this again in a few weeks.

UPDATE 7/13/2008 - The uptime is holding and performance has been good.  There was only one outage since the last update and it was very brief.

However, I am still very disappointed that Media Temple’s customer service during the poor service.  Their response to my issues were slow and pointless.  I expect accountability and help for my money.  I will evaluate their customer service again when the need to contact them arises.

The weather was decent early this afternoon and Rebecca wanted to get Levi a bike. He’s the youngest and the only kids of ours without a bike. Naturally, we went to Bike -n- Hike in Hillsboro because they’ve always treated us well. We picked out a bike for Levi that he liked (they only had one in his size - so it’s good that he likes it). We traded the training wheels for the kick stand. We don’t need no stinkin’ training wheels. Levi was up and riding in about an hour. He still needs to practice, but he’s gotten the hang of balancing already!

While we were at the bike shop, Beck spotted the white hawaiian Electra Townie 21 that she’s been wanting. It was all decked out already. The only negative is that it didn’t have an internal hub, but that just means it’ll need maintenance every once in a while… not a big deal. It’s a gorgeous bike.

You can see the whole set of pics on Flickr.

With such great weather, a trip to the Hoyt Arboretum was in order. It was great to get out of the house, away from the computers and TVs to spend the day hiking and taking pictures.

It was our first time to the Hoyt Arboretum and we were pleasantly surprised at how extensive the trails were. The trees were beautiful and the hike wasn’t too difficult. It was a great day out with the whole family.

Hoyt Arboretum from Jim Goings on Vimeo.

You can also check out lots of good pics that didn’t make the video on my Flickr site.

I recently purchased a Canon HV30 for work and gave it a quick test over the weekend. My wife drove me and my family around various parts of Hillsboro. I just shot what looked interesting.

Hillsboro Oregon from Jim Goings on Vimeo.

30 years after making mixtapes for your friends was all the rage, muxtape enters the scene with the new simple, digitial way of doing the same thing.

My muxtape has some tunes that I think are interesting and worth a listen.