When I first signed up at (mt) Media Temple about 3 years ago, I was looking for a decent shared hosting provider to, well, host my website(s) and files.

Since they had received a lot positive feedback throughout the web and host some of the bigger sites like Nike and Sony, (mt) made a good impression to me at that time.

Everything considered, (mt) seemed like the perfect choice and besides their (at that time) weird looking ‘home-brew’ control panel, I was really happy with them.

That was until they launched their apparently superior ‘Grid-Service’ back around October last year.

Not so superior for me…

Sure, the control panel now looks rather nice, however I got really bad latency since that time on.

Waiting ~10sec for my website to load? I don’t think so.

I contacted support and they asked me for a traceroute. And a traceroute they got.

However, I didn’t get a proper solution to my problem.

All they told me was “You may want to contact your local ISP for more information as to why you are getting such latency. Unfortunately there is not much we can do to assist you with this issue.”

Mmhhh, that’s weird. Before Media Temple upgraded to their ‘Grid-Service’, everything had been working as it should have.

Given that my 2-years-contract was about to run out, I started looking for another hosting provider.

That was when I came across Bion Hosting, a newly founded hosting startup based in Florida.

Frankly, they had me when I knew it was possible to contact one of the founders directly via MSN 24/7 in case of emergency.

When I signed up, I even got an educational discount, which is always greatly appreciated ;)

The first impressions were rather positive.

Speed was great, support was and is very responsive and they have some features (mt) currently simply does not offer (e.g. WebDAV).

Sadly, after the first two or so weeks I got bad latency again.

I contacted support and they asked for a traceroute. And a traceroute they got.

After a while they asked for another traceroute. And another traceroute they got.

A few days after that, I suddenly experienced my latency going back to normal.

“We optimized server configurations and contacted a backbone provider directly.”

Why couldn’t (mt) have done that?

I have not experienced any issues with Bion Hosting since and am very happy with how everything has turned out.

Should you ever need a hosting provider, try these guys. They are great.