MediaTemple Pioneers iPhone Account Center, (dpv)
Put this into perspective: it’s 9pm on a Friday night and you’re out in San Francisco at a bar when you get a text message, your friend tells you your server is down for whatever reason. Normally you would be hard-pressed to fix the issue while out on the town, until now. MediaTemple will be launching a hosting control panel for iPhone users. All you need to do is visit the account center with your iPhone and reboot the server or what have you. No other hosting company has done this, and with the rapid release of iPhone web apps, it’s a natural expansion.
I don’t have an iPhone at the moment so I can’t test it out, but instead you can indulge in these fancy images.
If your issue is larger than just rebooting a server, you can submit a support ticket via the iPhone account center. You can even buy a domain name if you think of the next big web app while eating dinner. I talked to Alex Capehart, MediaTemple’s Marketing Director, about this at WordCamp and he made it sound extremely helpful to have access to my server’s account center on the go.
Meet the Nitro (dpv) server.
Media Temple has been busy and they just rolled out a new, high-end server for uber-clients. The Nitro is like a (dv) dedicated virtual server with the exception that you are the only person on the server. You might be thinking, then why isn’t it just called a (dp) dedicated physical server instead of a dedicated physical virtual. The way the (dpv) works is your environment is within a virtual private server so MediaTemple can move your setup to another server without any issues quickly, if the need arises. It also makes scaling from a regular (dv) to the (dpv) a breeze.
The Nitro has 4GB of RAM, 15k RPM SAS drives, a 4-core Xeon chip and more, with the ability to load balance between two Nitro boxes. It’s a high-end solution for companies, massive sites or web developers that want to maintain many clients on their one machine. I’m on a mid-level (dv) 3.0 at the moment and don’t see myself needing the Nitro anytime soon, especially with my slew of optimizations that require less resources and result in less bandwidth even with more traffic.
Disclosure: I’m a MediaTemple customer and am part of their VIP community partnership program.
Looks sweet. You can test it out with iphoney if you don’t have an iphone.
http://www.marketcircle.com/iphoney/
@Peyton - I wrote about iPhoney a while ago but it doesn’t send the iPhone user-agent so it doesn’t work on real iPhone-only web apps.
Sounds kinda cool, but kinda gimmicky too. Reboot via SMS would perhaps be more useful for the majority of their customers?
In any case, I’m not sure I’d want to be brandishing an iPhone in any of my local bars — or maybe I’m just going to the wrong sort of places…
Just added an email address to my grid account… pretty slick!
… using the (mt) iPhone account center which has mysteriously disappeared from this post. Hrm.
This seems very overpriced to me and I don’t see how this is still different from a dedicated server. Most providers can offer you the same configuration for a cheaper price and even manage the server for you. Moreover, many companies can also migrate your site from a shared environment or a dedicated one quite quickly. There’s nothing new to this…
This just sounds like some sort of marketing technique, all they’re doing is giving their services some sort of fancy name hoping people will sign up because they feel this new service is “innovative”.
Prashant, I will agree with you that the Nitro is not cheap and dedicated servers can be had for less. The advantage to using the Nitro, in my opinion, is that higher quality server. How many other dedicated rigs have 15k RPM SAS RAID 1 drives to reduce the common I/O bottleneck? etc, etc. That and (mt) support.
Also, if your web app grows unexpectedly Media Temple can load balance it for you on multiple boxes. To me that is priceless as I would have no clue how to load balance servers by myself.
Paul here are the instructions that I used to set Firefox to send the iPhone user agent successfully. :)
http://forums.figma.com/showthread.php?p=43
Yet another level to aspire to :-)
Two things:
1) Amusing to see all the people who are so “standards-centric”, “NO ‘best with x browser’” all so quickly abandon their principles to play with their new shiny.
2) Yes, it is nice - Nitro - but it is expensive… you talk about the config. I moved from my old provider TO (mt), but there, for $290 a month I had a dedicated Dual Xeon 2.8, 2GB RAM, Dual SATA 250GB drives in RAID 1…
Also, in the interest of clarity, you should note that the load balancing is most definitely NOT included in the Nitro package, but is a priced add-on.
@Robert - SATA drives don’t belong in a server, there’s a reason that companies like OpenDNS stick with only SCSI drives and better. that’s just one thing differentiating the Nitro with other offerings. Yes, the load balancing is an add-on, which is why I stated “with the ability to load balance”.
SAS drives are even better than SCSI, with greater error recovery features than SATA. Anyone can build a server with a dual xeon, a few sticks of ram, some cheap sata drives and throw it in a colo. I am playing devil’s advocate here, but I just wanted to point out the huge differences between a cheap dedicated and a high-end dedicated.
With a cheap dedicated if you ever grew so large that you needed to load balance or throw the database on its own server, files on another, you’d be stuck if you didn’t have that knowledge. On the Nitro, all it takes is a call.
A lot of providers offer similar or better hardware for less. Simply buying 2 dedicated servers @ $375 per month each and installing VMWare with 1 VM on them would essentially give you the same or better solution. I haven’t been impressed with the speed of SAS drives, in the Sun X4100 I run for a client they don’t seem especially zippy. Have heard good things about mt’s customer service however.
Remember that $750 per month is $9000 per year - you would do far better to buy a $3K system (which is about what this system is) and colocate it at a good facility for say $100 per month, if you are going to keep it long term.
Has any other phone release been given as much attention to app development as the iPhone? Apple stores should leverage this in advertising what the iPhone can do. From the surface the iPhone is fairly handicap, but the more I hear each day about new applications for them… I am starting to want one.
@patrick - just an fyi, not that it matters with your point, but if you purchase 1 year of the Nitro, it is $8,000.
as for buying a system and colo-ing it, if your system breaks you have to buy and replace parts and suffer downtime. On the Nitro, you’re instantly moved to a new server if something like that should arise.
Great post. I recently switched to (mt) and like the interface. The fact I can get to the server from my iPhone is a big plus.