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Moving to Media Temple
Today I moved a load of sites (including this one) over to Media Temple. The process has been fairly painless, although I'm still trying to figure out a coupe of niggles.
My main frustration has been with e-mail hosting. MT won't let you enable mail on a domain until the MX records have been moved over to them (in a nutshell, the MX records are used by your e-mail server to find the remote server to send e-mail to for particular domains). Due to the way that DNS works, it can take up to 24-48 hours for any changes you make to DNS to be picked up by MT. Once the MX records have been propagated, only then can you enable mail on your domain so it can start accepting e-mails.
This, to me, is madness. If someone sends me an e-mail after I've made the DNS changes but before MT allows me to enable e-mail, that mail is lost forever. Permanently. At best, the sender will get an error report saying that no e-mail server could be reached whch is unprofessional at to say the least.
I don't see why MT can just warn you that your MX records are not correct but still let you enable e-mail. The overlap would allow e-mail to flow freely to both old and new servers with no errors. Hopefully someone at MT will pick this up and rethink a little ;)
Matt,
I'm a RIA developer for a small startup, and at the same time manage my own dedicated servers with a small collection of clients on them. My own little company has DNS reseller account with Enom...primarily because they offer not only registrar services, but also DNS hosting/management on their DNS cluster which updates to almost all locations on the net in about 10 - 30 seconds from the time you click the save button on their management paneel...really! We LOVE this as we've had our own servers for the past 10+ years, and have had to bounce accounts from one server to another from time to time, and this fast DNS update (including MX records) has been such a HUGE improvement from the way we were doing it prior to Enom (a manner that I suspect is pretty much the same as what you are doing now...with non-registrar managed DNS servers).
Feel free to check them out, and if you want to discuss what it would take to move your domain to this kind of a system (there are a few decent registrars that offer it now) let me know. You can reach me at dcdigital72 at mac dot com