Media Temple’s New Grid Server

TechCrunch reported on the launch of Media Temple’s new hosting service called Grid Server this morning. It promises to be a new kind of hosting platform that’s priced more like shared hosting ($20/month), but is instantly scalable on demand (more like Amazon’s EC3 computing service).

For $20/month you get 100 GB is storage and 1TB of bandwdth. If you have overages, they charge you incrementally. You can host up to a 100 sites and there’s an option for Ruby on Rails (but only 1 app per account it seems).

I’ve decided to give the Grid Server a spin with one of our projects. Signup was fairly easy, as was setup. I started with a 1-click install of a Wordpress installation and have played around a little bit since then. The control panel is quite intuitive. The site speed seems to be much faster than Dreamhost’s, but that might just be because it’s still a new service and they haven’t been stressed.

I’ll report my experiences after a few weeks/months after we test out the Grid-Server, its capabilities, speed, etc. It’s still too early to tell if the Media Temple Grid $20/mo. service will trump my Dreamhost Shared $8/mo. service (when it comes to real-world usage), but it really does look promising.