Archive for the 'Media Temple' Category

Missing an Email? It may be Media Temple’s Fault

Published
by
Chris Meller
on November 11, 2007
in Announcements, Commentary, Hosting, Internet, Media Temple, Networking, Security, Techno-Babble and Wordpress
. 6 Comments

It started last week when I was trying to sign up for Ron Paul Christmas. For some peculiar reason, I didn’t receive the welcome email. After talking with the site owner, it turned out (mt) was rejecting the email because the email address wordpress@ronpaulchristmas.com didn’t exist on the sending server.

Now, this isn’t particularly unusual. There is no requirement1 that an email address actually exist for a server to send email as if it were from that address. This is especially true from Wordpress blogs, which often send email from wordpress@domain.com accounts on behalf of their owners. Now, since this is only used for outgoing email, in most cases users would never bother setting the email account up. Why would you? You’re never going to be receiving email there2, so what’s the point?

Well, (mt) apparently knows better than you do… For “security reasons”3, their grid service does a “callback” check on every incoming email address. If the server handling mail for domain.com doesn’t recognize that account (such as our wordpress@domain.com example), (mt)’s server will reject the message.

I’ve tried to point out that this kind of behavior can be detrimental, particularly in the age of blogging and web services we now exist in, but the best answer I’ve been able to get out of (mt) is that I should add the sending address to their Mail Protect whitelist. Well great, unless I can add *@* to the whitelist, or at the very least wordpress@*, that’s hardly a viable solution - how do I know the address that’s sending to me if I never get the email?

If you use Media Temple’s grid service4, please contact (mt) immediately and tell them this is an unacceptable situation. I love a lot of aspects of their grid service, but this is clearly not one of them…

  1. In most cases, anyway. [back]
  2. Except for bounces, should someone put in an invalid email address [back]
  3. According to the support representative that responded to my ticket. [back]
  4. Or you want people who do use it to actually receive emails you send to them. [back]

Sorry for the Downtime…

Published
by
Chris Meller
on April 7, 2007
in Announcements, Internet and Media Temple
. 0 Comments

Sorry for the downtime today… I made the mistake of attempting to migrate back to my Media Temple (gs) account.

What Happened
The migration went well, and I got everything up and running without any problems. Great, off to Starbucks! An hour later I return home, click refresh… And get a Wordpress error that it can’t select my database. Great, what now?

I log into my Media Temple account, and see that the database is still listed there. Flip to phpMyAdmin, and notta. Database isn’t listed.

The Problem
I submit a trouble ticket and wait about 15 minutes without a result. Fine, we’ll call their 800 number. I get in the queue and their automated system tells me I’m #6 and the estimated hold time is about 9 minutes. Ok, that’s not too bad, especially if they’re having a problem…

21 minutes later, I get a technician. Robbie was quite nice and knew right away what my problem was. Apparently there was a problem with the database permissions, and they were having to re-set permissions on a large number of newly-created databases (including one of mine that had been created at least 24 hours previously). An admin was working on it, and it should be about an hour…

My Verdict
It looked like (mt) had gotten the kinks worked out in their new (gs) system. The last downtime report claimed less than 15 minutes, and I hadn’t even noticed it (nor had my site monitoring service, Site 24×7). I finally decide to switch back, and promptly get kicked in the gut (or somewhat lower) for my trouble.

I don’t care if they haven’t charged me for this service since I started in October… It’s not worth it. Goodbye, Media Temple. I’ll have my bags packed by tomorrow.

Could (mt) Have Anything Else Go Wrong?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 24, 2007
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Gripes, Hardware, Hosting, Internet, Links, Media Temple, Networking and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

Just saw “Too many concurrent connections” SMTP error on (gs) GRID.Cluster.1 show up on my Google homepage.

Is there anything else that could possibly go wrong with the Media Temple (gs) service? By my count, thus far we’ve had:

  • Storage problems causing downtime
  • MySQL problems causing database downtime
  • PHP processing power problems causing downtime
  • Log processing problems causing log downtime

Have I missed anything? With the exception of actual network connectivity issues to the broken services on the grid, we’ve hit just about everything they could possibly have go wrong….

Don’t get me wrong, I really really really hope (mt) gets these issues worked out. I’m really looking forward to their MySQL grid containers release in March. Being able to edit your my.cnf file is a real advantage if you ask me. The ability to seamlessly scale up and then back down without being locked into a new plan level is also really cool. It just doesn’t seem like they’re ever going to get any new cool grid features built, because they keep underestimating the use of their existing features. Sometimes I wonder if there was really any beta testing of this platform at all before release…

From (mt) to Fuzzy Hosting - A Tale of Hairy Joy

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 21, 2007
in Commentary, Follow Up, Hosting, Internet, Media Temple and Techno-Babble
. 2 Comments

I just wanted to follow up to Thursday’s post about moving off of the (mt) grid to Fuzzy Hosting with a few more details about the move.

Migrating was as painless as you can ever hope for a change in hosting to be. Neither (mt) nor Fuzzy use any funky PHP or Apache configurations, so there wasn’t really anything “different” between the two accounts from the perspective of running Wordpress on them. While migrating, I also took the time to upgrade each blog I moved to Wordpress 2.0.7 - still no problems.

There were two minor inconveniences I ran into during the process, although to call them “problems” would be vast overkill since they were very easily worked around.

  1. No SSH Access
    Now to be fair, the average user probably wouldn’t call this a “problem”. Still, once you’ve gotten used to using the command line for migrations such as this (thanks to the scp command), it’s a pain in the butt to go back to regular old FTP. Still, not a big deal. In fact, I took the opportunity (while downloading my old content) to download the new version of Wordpress and uploaded it back up to Fuzzy before sending my content up.
  2. phpMyAdmin Importing
    The other issue I had was when re-importing my main blog. With all the statistics information, posts, and comments (none of which I was willing to part with) the database was rather large. The default PHP maxfilesize for an upload is 2MB. Unfortunately, the phpMyAdmin install found in Plesk inherits this setting. My database was too large to download and then upload all in one fell swoop. Instead, I had to do it in pieces, a few tables at a time. Fortunately, none of my tables were single-handedly larger than 2MB (at least when gzip’d) so it wasn’t a real issue.

Like I said, no real issues, but those were the two things that I did notice during the process that could have been slightly more seamless.

Overall I’m thrilled with the service I’ve received from Fuzzy, even if they did complain about one of my WP-Cron scripts (the reminder one, which tests cron by sending emails every 15 to 60 minutes I believe). They went in and deactivated this script, claiming it was sending out a crap-ton of blank emails to no one and that it was overloading their email server. Seems a tad over-exaggerated to me, but it wasn’t a big deal since it didn’t do anything useful anyway. I don’t much care for other people snooping around in my database and deactivating plugins I’m using on my blog, but I suppose it’s one of those things that hosting companies do from time to time (although in the dozen or so I’ve used in the past, no one has ever done such a thing).

Just as a side note to the whole process, at first I was going to dump a few of my more critical sites onto my Dreamhost account, just to get them up and running. Over the past several months, my Dreamhost account has been rock-solid, while (mt) has experienced massive amounts of downtime on their grid product1. Unfortunately, the Dreamhost panel was so unresponsive during the two days in which I was considering the move that I was forced to abandon that plan. I wasn’t really planning on getting yet a 3rd hosting account, but I’m glad that Fuzzy was there to help me get my sites back up and running.

UPDATE: Correction. Fuzzy Hosting doesn’t have an upload limit of 2MB on their phpMyAdmin installs. Apparently I mis-read the display (which I believe usually shows 2,048 KB):

Fuzzy Hosting Upload Limit
  1. According to monitoring by Site 24×7. [back]

Screw Media Temple!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 18, 2007
in Announcements, Daily Grind, Internet and Media Temple
. 3 Comments

That’s right, we’re finally off that god-forsaken host…

Welcome to Fuzzy Hosting everybody! Isn’t it nice and fuzzy and warm?

Here’s to better service in the new year… We never should have left our 1and1 dedicated server….