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!!!