It’s been a few long months owing to me having to take care of emergency familial issues, but remember that post I made back in March about Web Hosting Gone Wrong?

Shortly after I wrote that post, I spoke with Andrew from Media Temple about this matter and where he obviously was not allowed to go into situation specifics aside from what was publicly posted by Kyle, we were able to talk more in-depth about Media Temple’s policies and about specifics regarding theoretical situations which could result in the scenario that Kyle experienced. I aired my concerns – elaborated where necessary – and Andrew addressed them all quite thoroughly and we spoke at length about the various topics I had addressed in my previous blog posts.

At this point (actually, much earlier, but I have been unable to really sit down to write until now – sorry, Andrew!), I have to say that where I still have mild concerns about the potential ‘ease’ of going over resource allotment, I am satisfied with the results of the conversation and no longer have that sour taste in my mouth or the same misgivings I once had.

In case it wasn’t evident in previous posts or in case anyone needs a reminder, I will reiterate that my concerns were NOT regarding MT charging for overages (in other words, I wasn’t saying that MT shouldn’t charge for overages, period).

My greatest concern was how unexpectedly the overage-causing situation had happened (it was a total and complete accident and there was no prior indication that such a problem would happen), what the ramifications were (triggering the overage as the situation caused resource over-usage), what the implications might be (how easy would it be to go over resource allotment?), and then how MT INITIALLY handled the situation.

As a courtesy to Andrew and Media Temple, I will address the issues one more time and then close this particular ‘chapter’ of blog posts regarding Web Hosting Gone Wrong.

First and foremost:

In regards to resource allocation and overages, MT’s policies regarding overages and related fees is outlined on their site and users have the ability to track their usage of resources from their control panel.

The fees were NOT unexpected or necessarily unreasonable as they were accrued in accordance to usage policies, but the situation that caused the overage WAS quite a surprise (millions of 404 errors generated from the unexpected breaking of links due to site migration issues). For this reason, Kyle – as a new customer who had just finished with said site migration which had seemed to go just fine – was offered the waiving of the overage charges as a courtesy after further talks with customer service.

Initially, it wasn’t offered as policy is policy and the policy is no secret and neither is a user’s resource usage, but on further review of the situation and the circumstances, MT decided that the situation was very much accidental and even more unexpected and so gave an exception.

Seeing as how it was an unexpected accident (there had been no previous indication that something was wrong or broken) that grew rather suddenly to huge proportions and to someone who was still unfamiliar to MT’s system, I consider the gesture to be two things – courteous, and fair.

Also as a related aside, in regards to resource allocation and GPU usage and overages that can result in general, the resource allocation and GPU allotment is in place to ensure that all customers on the shared hosting get their ‘fair share’ of the resources. If one customer goes way over the allotment, that takes away from someone else’s resources, which isn’t fair for the other customers who are not going over their resource usage. So yeah, definitely not complaining about overages being charged when generally speaking.

And finally:

In regards to concerns about how ‘easy’ it seemed to go over resource usage (recall the stats and numbers I pulled from MT’s site in my previous post), Kyle’s situation was unique and uncommon in the sense of such an incident happening on a normal basis. Normal usage without generating millions of 404 errors would normally not be a cause for concern about overage.

Andrew also mentioned that there are some customers who know in advance that they will be going over and in such a case, they are prepared to pay for the related fees. Where some web hosts will lock down a domain for overage, MT allows the overage to happen without cost to the domain but at a cost to the user to compensate for the additional resources being used. Given the way their server structuring works, it makes sense and if nothing else, the terms of service are up-front.

In conclusion, where there seemed to be a bit of a tangle in regards to getting everything sorted out, everything has since been set straight.

With the forwardness of Andrew’s offer to speak with me about Media Temple’s policies and the situation described in this post and in previous posts (as much as is allowed, anyways, which I completely understand) and his courtesy offer to let me try Media Temple out as a web host so I can better understand what their service offers, I once again feel confident that Media Temple can provide users with quality service that is both transparent in policy and strong in fairness and communication.

Thank you Andrew for your time; I really appreciate it.

If there is anything you would like to add, please feel free to drop me a note and I will add it in this post.

~ EMG