Web Hosting Gone Wrong – $1000 a Month?!
Yes, for SHARED HOSTING!
A hosting plan that first started out at $20 a month suddenly jumped to over $1000 for the month due to some majorly insane and nonsensical (read the rest of this post and go read the original article yourself!) overages!
Before any conclusions are jumped, let me clarify a few things upfront first:
1a. As of March 08, a different resolution was offered by the hosting company in question. Please read THIS POST for the most current updates on the situation. For my own response to the ‘resolution’, please read THIS POST.
With that said:
1b. The person who had the webhosting gone wrong incident is not me.
The person in question is Kyle Matthews who owns and runs the ModMy network. The site in question for this particular situation is a client’s site: NegriElectronics.com.
Edit – 03.08.10: In an earlier version of the post, I forgot to mention which site it was that was specifically involved which could lead to a person thinking that it was the ModMy sites involved (since I credited Kyle with the ModMy network and didn’t mention the proper website involved). Not true! Sorry about the confusion and I made the proper edits accordingly! Thanks Kyle for the correction! 
and
2. I don’t know the person whom this incident happened to. I came across this story via a link someone posted in my Twitter stream.
The original story is posted on Kyle Matthews’ own blog, which can be accessed HERE.
and last of all…
3. I try to be as objective about things as possible when I write and I really try to not let the opinions and even experiences of others color my own perception.
Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear, right?
BUT.
4. Sometimes, the experiences of others have a great enough impact that it clearly affects my judgment.
Why? Because some experiences are so AWFUL that you really DON’T want to and CAN’T afford to risk experiencing something similar.
Therefore…
5. This is one of those times.
With that out of my system, here’s my reaction:
HOLY %$#@ING YIKES!!!
and
What the HELL is going on at Media Temple?!
If I weren’t so picky about inline text formatting that goes beyond bolding and italicizing, I would make the font size HUGE and colored red because that is the intensity of my HOLY%$#@INGYIKES feeling right about now.
After hearing about what happened with Kyle Matthews, Media Temple is seriously about to become last on my list of web hosts that I would recommend.
I say ABOUT because I know of several people professionally and personally who either still use Media Temple or have used Media Temple in the past and everything that I have ever heard from them for the most part has been rather positive if not outright glowing.
This isn’t to discount Kyle at all in any way, shape, or form, but I have heard what I have heard (and apparently, he heard similar, too, so I think he’ll understand!) and after all the ‘good things’ I’ve been hearing, to hear this is just…
DAMN, man. Just… DAMN.
Yes, nothing is ever perfect (even my host of choice – DreamHost – has its own share of ‘bad days’ on the occasion) and where every web hosting company has its ups and downs and the days where things just seem to go wrong…
This is the WORST incident of web hosting gone wrong that I have heard of in quite a while from any major hosting company that I know of and keep tabs on.
To do a rundown on what happened to Kyle (if you’re smart, you’ll go and check out his blog entry and read everything word for word yourself):
- he purchased the $20 / month shared hosting plan Grid-Service account from Media Temple and moved a site – NegriElectronics.com – on over
- the site had done perfectly fine previously on other hosting services that cost less and weren’t as hyped up as Media Temple’s services are (in fact, he used to be on DreamHost, but switched over because he wanted to have live support available and DH mostly uses support tickets)
- in the process of moving the site over, he generates almost 2 million 404 Apache error messages
- which causes Media Temple to strike him with huge overage charges stating that his GPU usage is going waaay over what is allotted for each month
Shit.
Things to note before I continue!
GPU, in the case of Media Temple, does NOT mean ‘graphical processing unit’; it means Grid Performance Unit because their shared hosting is done over a ‘grid’ network involving ‘hundreds’ of servers.
With this in mind, apparently Kyle’s 2 million 404 Apache error messages was enough to warrant him being struck with a grant total of $1000+ in overage charges.
I, as an outsider, find this both laughable and VERY troubling for a few different reasons.
Let’s take a looksee at Media Temple’s FAQs regarding the now-infamous GPU system and you’ll see what I mean:
In the ‘Overview’, there is this paragraph:
“The way this system is made possible is by keeping track of each customer’s individual usage using a system we created, called GPU (which stands for Grid Performance Unit). Each (gs) Grid-Service hosting plan includes a large number of GPUs which have been carefully calculated to provide 99.7% of all customers with enough resources to never exceed the GPU allocation. For those clients operating large scale web sites experiencing daily or infrequent traffic surges, GPUs allow you to host your websites without worrying about reaching an arbitrary limit before getting shut down.”
So I, as a potential MT client, reads this and thinks, “Oh hey, I have a decently sized site with fairly heavy traffic that was manageable by other shared hosts. MT is telling me that they have a superior system that not only calculates and divvies up GPUs amongst users in a way that gives users plenty of growing room, BUT also allows them to anticipate and handle out of ordinary spikes if necessary and without problem.”
Additionally, there’s this sentence in the ‘What if my service exceeds the allocated GPUs?’ section that reads, “One great aspect of the GRID is that it is built to handle spikes and surges in usage.”
Uhhh huh. Sure. After seeing the response to Kyle’s incident, I have to wonder.
And then, finally, there’s this gem:
“Based on the analysis of over 10,000 random sites, we emphatically show that the vast majority of sites (99.97%) run perfectly fine, even under serious traffic, and never exceed their GPU allocation. If you should exceed your GPU allocation you will simply be billed at the end of the month for the overage that your server incurred at the rate of $0.10 per GPU.”
And another where they talk about the possibility of a site being shut down due to excessive GPU usage:
“Yes. We have seen a very rare number of circumstances in which some customers have reached such “severe resource demands” that their ending monthly bill would greatly exceed a majority of hosting budgets. In most of these situations, the “severe resource demands” stemmed not from organic traffic patterns and usage, but rather from malformed software, hacked scripts, or highly inefficient programming techniques.”
Wow.
So the website in question – which had been hosted JUST FINE on other shared web hosts that didn’t hype everything up like Media Temple does and had no ‘malicious codes’, ‘malformed software’, or ‘highly inefficient programming techniques’ and whose only problem was 2 million 404 errors (seriously, go and check out his screenshots of his GPU usage chart) – was enough to cripple one of the Media Temple GPUs?
The GPU system that is oh so fine in how it’s supposed to handle the 99.7% of its users without any trouble whatsoever and even allows room for the occasional unexpected spikes?
The same GPU system that, because 99.97% of 10,000 random users in its userbase never exceed their CPU allocation, really SHOULD have been able to handle Kyle’s spikes from his single website?
(Unless you’re telling me that of the 10,000 random users, NOBODY there runs an even moderately successful commerical website?)
Enough so to warrant them – Media Temple – sticking to their guns and demanding that the overages be paid for even after the 404s were fixed and the GPU usage went back into ‘normalcy’?
Apparently so.
Apparently enough so that the customer service insisted that the whole incident is pretty much Kyle’s fault and that he should have 1) known about the GPU usage and 2) informed them that this might happen.
Uhhh huh.
Yeah, sure.
That’s a REALLY FANTASTIC thing to stick to a client when you’ve spent a whole page of 11 point font text rambling – fuck rambling, how about TRUMPETING – on and on and on about how GREAT your GPU system is and how 99.7% of users never even reach their allocated usage amounts and how 99.97% of a random 10,000 users have absolutely no trouble and also never run out of GPU resources at all!
Really fucking great, Media Temple. Really super fucking great way to give future and existing clients trust issues.
Quite simply, you promised but you didn’t deliver and for people who are considering your service, this incident gives them reason to mistrust you.
I mean, who the fucking hell wants to suddenly see a $1000+ overage bill for an issue they never experienced at any other hosting company using similar (or even smaller) shared hosting setups?
Hell, if I wasn’t bound (very willingly!) to DreamHost, I would seriously consider you guys as my web host but after seeing this fiasco?
Eeeeesh!
Given Kyle’s previous hosting situations and scenarios, I would have expected your service to AT LEAST hold up to that momentary spike and ACCOMODATE it WITHOUT such incredible overage charges.
The website in question somehow being in that 0.3 or 0.03% of users who managed to generate an insane amount of overage doesn’t cut it for me or for other people who are looking at this.
What a major disappointment – not just in performance, but in customer/client relations.
Really.
What. the. FUCK.
~ EMG
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