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Hosting PHP 5 sites on MediaTemple
After recommendation by my brother to try MediaTemple as a Hosting Provider, I moved one of my client websites (based on WordPress) to MediaTemple last month.
My initial view of the service was reasonably satisfied, except for I would have liked a more functional Hosting Panel, especially related to backing-up & restoring databases (instead of having to do it each time manually via SSH, maybe I have been spoiled by CPanel).
However, a week later, when I tried to upload another website, I was surprised to see each page request being redirected in an unusual manner. e.g. a request for http://mydomain.com got redirected to http://mydomain.com/gs-bin, or http://mydomain.com/page.php got redirected to http://mydomain.com/gs-bin/page.php.
It took me a while to figure out (through a hint from my brother) that the default MediaTemple configuration uses PHP 4 parser for PHP files, and you need to specify the appropriate configuration in the sites .htaccess file if you want the site's dynamic pges to be parsed by PHP 5. And my new site off-course was based off PHP 5 (Drupal 6.x based).
So, adding the following line to .htaccess resolved everything:
AddHandler php5-script .php
And looking back it later, I realized that I did not faced the same issue for the earlier site because it used WordPress which has pretty loose requirements.
However, I was a bit surprised that a cutting-edge grid Hosting service provider would keep atleast a decade old technology as default for its Hosting services!!!
I, too, had similar issues. Another issue is, if the something/someone stomps on the .htaccess file or your AddHandler call, the server automatically reverts back to PHP4.
A recent and more sneaky issue is Media Temple's MySQL version which is listed as 5.1.26 on their website. What you don't get to see, until you try and use it or call phpinfo() and look, is that they are in fact running the core MySQL version 5.1.26, HOWEVER, many of the associated and needed library files, in my painful experience, the PDO libraries, are STILL 4.1.11!! This has cause many issues while trying to install a site developed using the Zend Framework.
I am in no way Media Temple bashing, I have been 100% satisfied with not only their Grid Server host service, but also there very helpful support, and I currently have numerous sites hosted with them that work very well. However, we did have to move the "problem" Zend site to a host with the proper library files to match their MySQL core version. This move was necessary since the Grid Servers are shared resources, so understandably Media Temple wont upgrade their library files on a single person's request as it affect all their Grid Server users. The upgrade is in the plans, however, I could not get them to commit on a date.
Well Ryan, yes, I too am surprised that MediaTemple uses pretty old (actually obsolete by technology terms) versions of libraries. Hopefully, they will upgrade to a more recent version, as pointed by you. Thanks for sharing your experience.
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