In starting my blogging venture, the first thing I did was to pick up a few domain names for various sites. There are any number of places you can go for things like that, GoDaddy.com being one of the most popular.
Next, I needed somewhere to host my bevy of blogs. I’ve been building sites for years, and in that time, I’ve used quite a few different hosting services. My personal favorite continues to be Media Temple. Why? Let me count the ways…
First, they are fairly inexpensive. Their Grid-Service (gs) account gives me everything I could ever want — plenty of storage and bandwidth — for $20 a month or $200 a year. No, it’s not low-budget $2 a month hosting, but I want something that isn’t going to crash every time I turn around. If you want to save a bit of money, check RetailMeNot.com for coupon codes. I used the code retailmenot, which saves me 20% for the life of my contract with Media Temple, getting my cost down to $160 per year. For the quality of service, you can’t beat that.
Next, Media Temple saves me time. How? Well, I prefer WordPress for blogging. Yeah, WordPress is easy to install and set up on your own, but creating a database, editing config files, and setting file permissions on the server takes up valuable time. Media Temple has a one-click installer though, and it does all that setup for me automatically. I set up my new domain, tell Media Temple the name of the blog, and click Go. That’s it. Easy as pie. When I’m setting up a bunch of different blogs, having a feature like this can literally save hours of my time — and as they say, time is money.
Media Temple has great support. When I’ve had issues with other sites hosted on their service in the past, they have always been quick to respond and even quicker to resolve my problems. When you’re running a ton of sites and problems arise, you don’t want to wait hours to get in touch with the support gurus.
Finally, Media Temple is pretty solid. I’ve had sites hosted with other services over the years that were constantly going up and down. Media Temple has always seemed much more stable to me. Yeah, they have their issues from time to time just like anyone else, but overall, I’ll take them over the competition any time.
All in all, for an up-and-coming blogger, I think Media Temple offers a great hosting service at a great price. If you’re looking for somewhere to house your sites, I highly recommend that you get in touch with them right away.
Of course, that’s just my humble opinion. What do you think of Media Temple? Are there other hosts that you think are a better value for the dollar?