Media Temple announced their Grid-Service (gs) about a year ago and discontinued the (ss) Shared-Server plan I was on. They allowed SS users to continue and I did on a month-to-month basis for around $8 / month. But as expected, this service was no longer being improved and was left lacking many features you expect from a useful web host now days.

I was planning to upgrade to the Grid-Service plan, even though it cost more than double what I was paying per month, but I read many bad reviews and the features were still limited compared to the plan I have with Dreamhost.

Over the past 8 months I have migrated all my sites and all sites I host for personal clients from Media temple to Dreamhost. Everything except this blog, which I held off due to all the dynamic data stored on the mysql database.

I was also waiting for MovableType to upgrade to 4.0 and figured I could do the transfer and upgrade at the same time. Well, MovableType 4.0 beta 5 is out now, I installed a test site and the process was smooth as you could ask for, so simple. But the application is lacking a few key features that will not allow me to upgrade, specifically there are no advanced options for customizing your URLs, called ‘Archive Mapping’ in MT 3.35.

So over the past week I’ve slowly started moving over this blog, then yesterday I backed up the database, transferred the domain DNS, installed Movable Type 3.35, imported my database, imported Mint webstats database, made some adjustments to PHP includes as Dreamhost handles them differently and bang. We’re back to normal. Everything is working accept my Last.fm display for recently played tracks (fix that waaaay later on).

Dreamhost rocks, period. These guys are dedicated to offering the most options they can and the best service possible. It’s very affordable ($8 month) and in the three years I’ve hosted client sites on there, I’ve had great success. And they offer domain names at competitive prices ($9 year).