If you own a business, you need web hosting. After all, an attractive, information-packed website draws potential customers and clients, which is invaluable to an expanding business. Media Temple is a web hosting service that you should keep an eye on, as it offers quality shared, dedicated, WordPress, and VPS hosting that suit many small business needs. In addition, Media Temple has fantastic guides and help pages, and excellent 24-hour customer support. However, it’s a bit pricier than web hosts with similar offerings.
Shared Hosting Plans
With shared hosting, your website is stored on a server alongside other websites, literally sharing the system resources and splitting the cost. It makes for accessible and cheap web hosting. That said, there are limitations and drawbacks to shared hosting, typically in regards to traffic volume, so if your business needs a more robust plan to handle high traffic totals, you should check out dedicated, VPS, or cloud hosting options.
Media Temple has two shared hosting into two tiers: Shared Hosting and Shared Hosting Plus. The former offers the Deluxe, Ultimate, and Maximum plans. Deluxe (starting at $20 per month or $200 per year) offers 100 email boxes, unlimited domains, unlimited storage (with a 250,000 file limit), unlimited monthly data transfers, and 512MB of RAM. The Ultimate (starting at $30 per month or $300 per year) ups the RAM to 1GB and email accounts to 500. The top-tier Maximum (starting at $60 per month or $600 per year) gives you unlimited email boxes, and bumps the RAM total to 2GB. These are good, albeit somewhat expensive, shared hosting options.
If your site is growing fast, but you aren’t quite ready to tackle more advanced hosting tiers, Media Temple has several higher-performance shared hosting solutions that feature VPS perks: Shared Hosting Plus. This plan starts with the $40-per-month (or $400-per year) Launch option that offers a a single CPU core, 2GB of RAM, 60GB of SSD storage, unlimited monthly data transfers, and a free AutoSSL certificate. The Expand plan (starting at $110 per month or $1,110 per year) includes 4 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, unmetered monthly data transfers, and 150GB of SSD storage.
These are good plans, but you’ll get better bang for your buck with Editors Choice pick HostGator. It offers an excellent shared hosting Business plan with unlimited websites, unmetered bandwidth, unmetered storage, and a free SSL certificate starting at $16.95 per month.
VPS Hosting Plans
Virtual private server hosting, or VPS, is the next tier up from shared hosting. With it, multiple sites still exist on the same server, but there are far less in total. You pay more for this tier than you would with shared hosting, but you get significantly more computing power. It’s a great option if you expect a lot of traffic to your site, but don’t want to spend as much cash as you would for dedicated hosting.
Media Temple offers a selection of customizable VPS web hosting options, from the basic, $10-per-month plan to a fully managed, $310-per-month package. The former, self-managed plan starts you off with one CPU core, 1GB of RAM, and 20GB of SSD storage. The latter plan delivers 8 CPU cores, 32GB of RAM, and up to 400GB of SSD storage that’s managed by Media Temple’s professional support.
These are fairly robust offerings, but much like Media Temple’s shared hosting services, you can find similar plans elsewhere for less money. Hostwinds, PCMag’s Editors’ Choice pick for VPS hosting, offers a Linux-based, fully managed VPS plan with 8 CPU, 32GB RAM, and 400GB SSD storage for $168.74 per month; that’s almost 40 percent cheaper than Media Temple’s best VPS offering. What’s more, Media Temple servers run Linux exclusively, whereas Hostwind offers Linux and Windows VPS hosting.
No More Dedicated Web Hosting
Media Temple no longer offers dedicated web hosting, the category that gives your site a server’s full resources. If you need serious muscle for your domain, check out AccuWeb. The Editors’ Choice for dedicated hosting features 20TB of monthly data transfers, 1TB of storage, and 8GB of RAM for $105 per month. It’s a fantastic and affordable service should your website need powerful, dedicated resources.
WordPress Hosting Plans
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems, so it comes as no surprise that Media Temple supports the CMS with five plans. Media Temple’s WordPress tiers range from the $20-per-month Ultimate to the $120-per-month Pro 25. The entry-level plan supports a single site, and offers unlimited storage and monthly data transfers, one staging instance, a SSL certificate, daily malware detection and removal, and a SEO optimizer. Pro 25 builds upon Ultimate with support for 25 sites, and featuring 100GB of storage. In addition, Media Temple offers a $30-per month e-commerce plan that comes bundled with WooCommerce extensions for business-focused sites. It includes all the Ultimate package’s perks.
Media Temple’s WordPress options are competitively priced, but A2, the co-Editors’ Choice pick for WordPress hosting, just beats it out. A2 has managed WordPress hosting that features 10GB of storage, unlimited monthly data transfers, automated daily backups, a free SSL certificate, and the ability to host a single site for $16.99 per month. The $49.99 option gives you unlimited website hosting and 40GB of storage. Bluehost, another co-Editors’ Choice pick, has an incredibly cool WordPress Website Builder for $10.99 per month.
Reseller Hosting
If you’re looking to get into the web hosting business but you don’t want to deal with infrastructure matters, reseller hosting is the way to go. Unfortunately, Media Temple doesn’t offer reseller plans. For that, we suggest checking out Hostwinds, the category’s Editors’ Choice pick.
Hostwinds’ plans, starting at $25 per month, have unlimited email, storage, and monthly data transfers. It offers dedicated and VPS reseller packages that are available with the Linux or Windows Server operating system, as well as Linux-based shared hosting. The servers have the same RAM and storage amounts as those Hostwinds supplies directly, which is not the case with every web host. Hostwinds also lets you apply your own branding to the servers you rent out, and it supplies 24/7 tech support.
Cloud Hosting
Like many other web hosts, Media Temple has cloud hosting. That web hosting type draws resources from multiple servers, which makes it easy to scale power as needed. Media Temple’s cloud hosting is powered by Amazon Web Services. The plans are customized to each individual business, so you must call Media Temple’s support squad to get a quote.
If you want to get up and running with cloud hosting without speaking to a human being, check out 1&1 Ionos or DreamHost, the category’s co-Editors’ Choice picks. The former targets businesses that need big power, while the latter targets your typical small business.
Building a Media Temple Website
Most hosting services include some type of website builder, so it is a little surprising that Media Temple does not. Like DreamHost, Media Temple requires you to create your website elsewhere and then upload it via FTP. In fact, even Virb, the standalone website builder that Media Temple used to offer, is notably absent. If you want to use a website builder, check out our Editors’ Choice picks, Duda, Gator, or Wix.
E-Commerce and Security
If you want to sell items online, Media Temple has the tools you need. The Magento e-commerce app lets you create an attractive store in just a few minutes by dragging and dropping website elements. Magento has more flexibility than 1&1’s Online Store in terms of colors and design options, but with that flexibility comes an extra layer of creation complexity that demands more of your time.
Media Temple’s Grid infrastructure ensures swift and efficient content delivery, but it also offers a spruced-up content delivery network powered by Sucuri if you need additional security. For $10 monthly, you can use the Sucuri CDN, which includes a web app firewall and SSL certificate. This ensures an encrypted connection, providing extra security for site visitors when they make purchases through your website. If you’re planning to sell a product, consider this essential. For additional safety, Media Temple also offers a $19-per-month Security Pack that provides malware protection, blocklist scans, Sucuri’s CDN, and a SSL certificate.
Ultimate Uptime
Website uptime is an important part of the web hosting experience. If your site goes down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. For testing this, we use a website-monitoring tool to track our test sites’ uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends us an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. The data revealed that Media Temple is very stable. In fact, it didn’t go down a single time during the test period. You can count on Media Temple to serve as the bedrock for your online business.
Customer Service
We contacted Media Temple’s 24/7 customer support team a total of four times, twice during the day and twice during the evening, to get a sense of the team’s knowledge, effectiveness, and overall responsiveness. The tech support was always reachable in our experience, though the sales team is only available from Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST. Still, customer support was pleasantly helpful and informative when it came to tech support questions, or general questions regarding the strengths of each plan. We asked about installing WordPress plug-ins during one of the calls, and received an accurate answer and explanation in response.
If you prefer to find your own answers, Media Temple features an encyclopedic knowledge database that’s filled with articles and videos. Lastly, Media Temple offers a 30-day, money-back guarantee. That’s not as lengthy as DreamHost’s 97-day, money-back guarantee, but it’s enough time to let you test the service for a few weeks.
A Quality Web Host
Media Temple is a web hosting service that offers many attractive plans, provided that you don’t need reseller, dedicated, or Windows hosting. Frugal businesspeople may find similar services at somewhat lower prices elsewhere, but Media Temple is extremely easy to use, and features a tremendous reference database, excellent customer support, and terrific uptime that make the higher prices more palatable. For a more well-rounded web hosting experience, check out DreamHost and Liquid Web, our Editors’ Choice picks for small business and enterprise hosting, respectively.
If you’re new to the expansive web hosting field, take some time to check out our primers, such as How to Create a Website and How to Register a Domain Name for Your Website.
