After the long outage of my Webhosting Shootout test site at Media Temple I was curious to see what their response would be.

Media Temple’s Support team did the best they could, and offered me 2 free months of hosting.

That’s pretty reasonable.

When Pingdom’s monitoring first alerted me to the outage I decided not to contact Media Temple and let them respond as they normally would. The service was restored but I didn’t hear from Media Temple. I wrote to them yesterday – here are the 2 email responses.

The first response acknowledged the problem and told me a bit about what happened.

Charlie,

Looking over the history of the shared MySQL SmartPool that your server has been associated with I see that there was a sustained period of database latency that was causing the connectivity error.  When an error such as this normally occurs and automated system will move the database causing the resource shortage to a private environment to allow the other users to return to normal usage.  Unfortunately at this time there is no information on the cause of the latency that was experienced.

This support request has been reassigned to a higher level technician to review your other requests and questions.  Please anticipate a delay while this support reuqest is reassigned and researched,

If you have any further questions regarding your (mt) Media Temple services, please feel free to contact us at any time.

Best Regards,

The second response gave me more details AND 2 free months of hosting!

Charlie,

In regards to this issue, the cause of the issue was due to high load on the database server. Our Engineers were notified to this issue but unable to quickly provide a resolution. They worked on this issue throughout the night until they were able to restore service to the database server.

Due to this inconvenience we will be compensating you with 2 months of credit and applying it to your account. This requires the assistance of a billing administrator.  Please anticipate a short delay while we re-assign your support request to a billing administrator.

Best Regards,

So for me, I can’t stand downtime but I know it happens. I would have preferred a nice note from Media Temple alerting me to the issues and telling me that they are on it, but I know this type of note opens them up to a firestorm of email and calls from people demanding attention while there’s a problem.

This particular problem occurred after midnight on December 26 – you really couldn’t pick a better time for a site to go offline. That said, 5 hours is a damn long time.

What do you think? Let me know if you’d be satisfied with Media Temple’s response if this had been your blog.

charlie

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