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Here’s yet another mediatemple post — they just keep on rolling out the goods, it’s hard not to love them! This time I’ll be reviewing their MySQL Containers which were released during their last Grid system update four months ago but I’ve only had access to them now.

What is a MySQL Container?
If you’re thinking of running a large social network or a lot of sites that will perform a lot of database queries (*cough* WordPress), then performance would be greatly improved by having a machine dedicated to managing a database. A MySQL GridContainer is just that. It gives you isolated RAM and CPU for your own databases. These resources are not shared with anyone else and is therefore protected from other users and their applications. After all, you don’t want your site knocked offline because someone else on your shared hosting crashed your shared database!

Extra Features
MySQL Containers aren’t just a fancy name for a dedicated database machine. They also come with several useful features that typically aren’t available on shared hosting services.

• Reboot Container: Lets you manually restart your MySQL container, clearing RAM and reloading all software. Useful in case something goes wrong or if you installed something that requires a reboot. Most shared hosts don’t let you do this yourself!
• Repair Database: Instead of navigating through each database and repairing/optimizing your tables, this one-click feature will do it all for you.
• Query Analyzer: My favorite feature! This tool will analyze the queries run by all of your sites to identify inefficient queries that may be causing a bottleneck on your system. I ran this myself and of course, being the efficient web developer than I am, have no reported slow queries!
• MySQL Report: Generates a comprehensive report about pretty much anything you’d need to know about your databases along with an explanation as to what each section of the report means. Haven’t looked too deep into this feature yet but it sounds good on paper.

For more details, you can read the complete F.A.Q. regarding MySQL Containers.

How much does it cost?
No, MySQL Containers aren’t free. They range from an extra $20 to $150 per month depending on the specs of the container you want. However, with any of mediatemple’s hosting packages, your databases are hosted on what’s called the MySQL SmartPool. Here, your database queries are run on one of hundreds of dedicated MySQL machines and every user has 64mb of dedicated RAM (which should be plenty for moderate database usage).

I’ve been using the SmartPool and haven’t run into any problems until a couple days ago when I hit a sudden surge of traffic on my photo-sharing site. Luckily, mediatemple has a feature called “database bursting” that will seamlessly move your databases into your very own MySQL Container for 3 days, completely free of charge! This is actually how I got access to the Grid Conatiner section of the control panel in order to take the screenshot above.

Of course, if mediatemple finds that you’re constantly bursting into a dedicated MySQL container, they’d recommend that you buy an actual container for yourself. I plan on buying a container soon as I will be adding a couple more database-intensive sites to my hosting. This will bring my site count to a grand total of 22 sites which is beginning to push my GPU limits, so I will be moving to their (dv) package pretty soon as well.

Time to Switch?
If you’re unhappy with your current web host or if you’d just like to give mediatemple a try, make sure you read this post to find several discount coupons to get their famous grid server hosting package for about $14 a month. I’d also be very grateful if you’d use my affiliate link to sign up!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.