Media Temple DV - what's really included?

Joined: 11/28/2008

What exactly is provided with Media Temple DV, and what will I need to add on my own? I read the review and some other comments on the service, and it looks promising. But this is new to me, since I've always used shared hosting.

Shared hosting has plenty of drawbacks, but everything is provided for me, so that I simply upload my site or sites and I'm done. What must I know and do to get going with a virtual server?

I'm very seriously looking at rebuilding my primary graphics site with Drupal. If that works out well, I will likely redo all my sites, and use Drupal from now on. I'm also looking to make the switch from a shared hosting service to a virtual server, but I don't want to create more problems.

I don't mind the pain of change, so long as down the road I can concentrate on my real work, which is Christian graphics, and not be continually chasing problems with servers.

Joined: 07/28/2008
Great support and Root level control of a VPS server

Hi Jim,

I got a Media Temple DV server a few months back. So far things have gone pretty smooth.

I have used both shared hosting packages and a dedicated managed servers. This is my first experience with Plesk. Compared to my shared host control panel, the Plesk interface lets you do pretty much the same server set-up operations as my shared host Web Control Panel. Some functions seem a bit slow to do via Plesk IMO. Overall it was pretty easy to set up. You can also get root SSH access and make changes via the command line (which i prefer).

As far as "what's included for a Drupal site", you should have everything you need to install off the bat. Plesk does have an auto install for Drupal, but I recommend installing Drupal yourself.

I did have to make some modifications to enable PHP SOAP (for the Ubercart FEDEX Quotes module) and to give Drupal access to paths outside of the web directory for Ubercart file downloads. MT support helped by either pointing me to tutorials in their Knowledge Base or sending me to independent tutorials.

Matt Farina recommended on these forums to run APC to increase performance.

The coupon code "retailmenot" can save you 20%.

G&G Podcast Host
Matt Farina's picture
Joined: 06/01/2006
Control and managed updates

With a MT DV you can have control over the server with root access and you can opt in to have them manage and update the software on your system.

You get decent hard drive space, lots of bandwidth, plenty of ram, one click installs.

Note, I'm biased. I run most of my sites on a DV.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Former Co-Host
www.mattfarina.com