shared hosting

mediatemple is offering 'grid' service instead of shared hosting, saying it's outdated and more prone to downtime or hardware issues. Is this true? Is Dreamhost planning to do something similar?

Is this spam or a legitimate inquiry?

Anyway, if legitimate I find it interesting that one of the key technologies behind their grid is that they NFS mount user directories to their web servers and load balance these servers using a (network) load balancer.

Sound a little like what DreamHost does? Sure it does. The key difference is that DreamHost doesn't load balance the CPU load across machines. But then again, theory says that if you're running all low load sites, your server performance won't be affected by high load sites on your server because... there aren't any. By high load sites I mean sites that utilize a significant portion of the CPU for extended periods of time.

I'd also worry a bit about the GPU limit and automated overage billing, but that's without any personal experience with typical sites.

Caveat: My experience with clustering is with large enterprise applications where one site requires 10's or hundreds of dedicated servers. We had to significantly re-engineer our apps to run in a clustered environment (though I admit that you wouldn't have to if you were running Apache and PHP in CGI mode - the implied statelessness suffices).

--Is Dreamhost planning to do something similar?
I would hope not.

1. I am not convinced that this technology is stable yet. I think last tuesday most of mediatemples grid sites were down for a large portion of the day.

2. Grid hosting will always cost more than shared hosting.

Taking those two points together I see no real reason for dreamhost to switch to gridhosting.

Grid hosting just seems like a foo waiting to happen, the more complicated the server structure becomes the more likely you are to have a failure and the longer that failure will likely last.

You probably mean 'clustered hosting'. Clustered hosting can improve stability for high-load sites (Fortune 500 companies) but from my experience, it will only cause your site to slow down if the server is running at low load (which is what they do at DreamHost). The idea is that the load will be split among the servers and being collated as a whole before sending back to the user. This results in delay such as waiting for the remaining packets to be process and networking time. Therefore, it is not recommended unless your server experience high load.

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I heard about servage.net but never tried the service. It is said to have clustered hosting service which can load balanced your site, but I look at webhostingtalk.com and there's some negative reviews about servage so I never tried the services yet though it just look interesting to me.