I've had a love/hate relationship with the MediaTemple (gs) service. As a former user and subscriber, I originally signed up because I had outgrown other small shared webhosting pacakges (of the $7/month variety). I needed something that was a little big more powerful and a little quicker without a huge price tag or the requirement of managing a server. So, I jumped up to this $20/month "grid" server package (which is supposed to be more reliable than other shared hosts because of their grid technology)

For a while, I was quite happy with the service. It was fairly solid and was worth the slightly higher pricetag. However, after about a year of usage, it seemed like the secret got out. The servers became slower and crashed more often. I was because more and more people were being put onto the same 'grid' that I was and it slowed everything down.

This is not unique to mediatemple's (gs). They do better than most with this overcrowding issue and their performance is still acceptable. It's still the best shared hosting price I've seen for the money. I can recommend it if you don't want to jump above $20/month for hosting...but I will still suggest that, if you need solid performance you're going to pay for it and this package wont' cut it.

In the end...i"d call it 'acceptable'. But, personally, I'm now spending more for their dedicated virtual pacakge because I got tired of the (gs) outages and slow speeds.

I recently moved my sites onto the grid because my previous hosting package was just too slow running Drupal 6. So far I am enjoying the (gs) Grid Servers, but I do have one complaint. The (gs) accounts can only have one ssh account that accesses the website directories. You can grant ssh access to other users, but it only lets them into their user folder. When I contacted tech support I was told that it was a limitation of the (gs) grid server design.
Over all I am very happy with the service of Media Temple and I notice the performance difference that my extra $14/month is getting me.
Just make sure that if you're planning to sign up, that only one user needs server ssh access or you really trust the other users to share one login ID.

In a world of you get what you pay for this is a pretty good deal. At $20 a month you get a package between shared hosting and a small Virtual Private Server.

The grid works by putting your site on a grid of computers where it can be served by any of them. If one of the servers goes down your site will stay up. There is a bit of processing, though not to the level of a VPS, and quite a bit of bandwidth and storage.

There is one issue with the grid. Since your site can be downloaded from a number of different servers the files need to be copied to one of those servers before it can server it. This has caused slow loading on some site, especially Joomla, Drupa, and other CMS sites. If you are running static pages or smaller scripts there should be a problem. It's when file sizes get large that the slow down happens.

For the price it's a pretty solid deal. Just remember you get what you pay for. If you want VPS service you need to pay for that. If you are looking for something between VPS and shared hosting this is a package worth checking out.

I figured I'd start with grid service and move up to (dv) when I needed it. Unfortunately their grid-service was so poor, I doubt I'd ever get a chance to try their (dv). It appears to be oversold to no end, and the memory for mySQL is broken. I constantly run out with a Drupal site that runs fine on other shared hosts. They said it's a known problem that they're working to resolve, but that was MONTH's ago!

Get grid service at your own risk, but you'd be much better going somewhere else for shared, even if you upgrade to (dv) in the future. I was told before signing up that migration to (gs) to (dv) was simple. I took that to mean it was seamless with no action on my end, but apparently I was mistaken because I have to buy (dv) and have (gs) simultaneously and migrate my stuff over on my own. That was the only reason I got (gs) to begin with, so I would have been much better somewhere else.

I've used MediaTemple for a client's site on two occasions, one of those on the grid. Performance is abysmal both on the Shared and Grid hosting. (Shared is deprecated and I don't think you can get it anymore.) Their support people are very handwavy. Control panel is confusing. They apparently demand control of your DNS (but don't seem to notice if you don't actually give it to them).

I'm currently working with three different shared hosting providers (BlueHost, ANHosting and HostGator), and any of these provides much, much better performance than MediaTemple, have excellent support, and use cPanel as their control panel, which is much easier to work with than MT's proprietary mess. All at significantly lower prices.

Bottom line is that as far as I am concerned, MT are way over-hyped. From what I've seen, they do not provide good value for the money.

The high price and slick look of MT does not justify the (gs) as an elite option, something like a VPS-lite or very beefed up and solid shared hosting. It is simply a mess of insecurity, mail failure, high downtime, and most of all chronic SQL latency if not dropped database connections. This has been true since the (gs) was launched in 2006.

Take a look at Shaun Kester's analysis based on his latency plugin for Wordpress -- the best quick, objective revealer of the biggest constant headache on the grid.

Here is what I wrote about it back when I was still hoping MT would sort things out.