Media Temple

» see mediatemple.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Media Temple started in Los Angeles in 1998 under three founders, and the product barely changed afterward: hosting that cost more than the cheap stuff and was supposed to be worth the difference. The company wrote its name as (mt) Media Temple, lowercase and in parentheses, which tells you almost everything about the customer it was after. Not the person buying a domain for a family business, but the person who had opinions about where their files lived.

The product that made the name was the Grid, launched in 2006. Instead of putting a customer's site on one server and hoping that server stayed up, the Grid spread it across a cluster, so a traffic spike on one site did not take down the machine everybody else was sharing. That was an unusual thing to sell in 2006 and it pulled in exactly the customer who understood why it mattered. By 2017 the company had more than 200 employees, and its own marketing copy was still addressed to developers and web designers rather than to anyone else.

This was a premium American host billing in dollars, and the distance shows up in the price list rather than anywhere cultural. Hosting where I was meant a Turkish provider or the cheapest shared plan that would run PHP, and nobody I knew was paying a US company a monthly premium for cluster architecture. What did travel was the badge. You would be reading some design studio's portfolio, scroll to the bottom, and there it was, (mt), put in the footer on purpose by someone who wanted you to notice. For years that parenthetical was the most visible thing about the company to anybody outside its customer list.

GoDaddy bought Media Temple in October 2013 for $94.5 million in cash. The stated reason was to win the hearts and minds of developers, a constituency GoDaddy had spent the previous decade actively losing, and the stated plan was that Media Temple would keep operating independently with no changes for staff or customers. That held, more or less, for about nine years.

~ the record ~

~ the twenty four years ~

In December 2022 Media Temple announced that the brand was being retired and that, starting in February 2023, every Media Temple account would become a GoDaddy account. The migration ran through the year and the retirement finished in September 2023. The farewell was short and did the arithmetic itself: thanks for allowing us to serve you for 24 years, and the time has come to say goodbye. GoDaddy's own framing was that if you looked closely at its hosting products you would find Media Temple's fingerprints all over them, which is a generous way of saying the engineering was kept and the name was not.

~ what the homepage never said ~

The odd part of the ending is that the website never acknowledged any of it. The mediatemple.net homepage was crawled for the last time on 17 June 2023, four months after accounts had started converting to GoDaddy and three months before the brand was finished. It is a 142 KB Gatsby build titled "Premium Web Hosting Services | Media Temple", selling premium hosting in the present tense. No banner, no notice, no date.

That same page had been byte-identical since early February 2023. The Internet Archive holds one unchanging digest across more than four months of captures, which means nobody touched the marketing site at all while the company behind it was being dismantled on a published schedule.

After 17 June 2023 the captures stop, and the next one is a redirect in March 2024. Today the apex answers at all of 393 bytes under the title "Access Denied", and GoDaddy's brand page is where the traffic lands. A host that spent two decades selling uptime finishes as a 403.

~ what godaddy kept ~

Media Temple did some acquiring of its own. In June 2008 it bought Virb, a portfolio-and-profile site that had launched the previous year as a MySpace successor and had been outrun by Facebook almost immediately. Virb became a paid website builder under Media Temple in 2010, passed to GoDaddy along with everything else in 2014, and was shut down with no warning in June 2020. The parent outlived that one by three years before being folded in itself.

The clustered-hosting ideas the Grid was built on are ordinary now, sold by everybody, including the company that bought the team that shipped them early. The old name is still legible in exactly one place, which is the HTML of design portfolios nobody has rebuilt since.

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