Media Temple's two main hosting services, for the past few months, have been the Grid and Dedicated Virtual (dv) hosting. The Grid is their cloud system that takes the place of shared hosting, but is super scalable and can theoretically host any size size. The dv is a virtual system on a shared server, but that one virtual server is dedicated to your site and you have root access. They also have a "complex hosting" solution, but that is a non-standard package that seems to be handled on a case-by-case basis for extremely-high demand sites. According Read/Write Web MT will be offering another solution in the near future, Nitro. This is a dedicated physical server (aka a dedicated server, just like those available anywhere) but you get access to Media Temple's virtualization toolkit. What does this mean? Well, from what we can see so far, it is a step up from the dv system- basically they get that virtual system on a shared box and move it to a dedicated system in a completely seamless upgrade. The virtualization is what makes this possible, so it's a major attraction to sites that are on the rise as an upgrade will be easier than ever. Plus it will then be possible now to do hardware upgrades or to load balance across multiple Nitros. If your site has outgrown the dv Extreme package ($150 a month) this is the only feasible option. The Nitro server is a very capable system. Here are the specs:

• HP Proliant Server
• Quad Core Woodcrest Xeon 2.33 Ghz
• 4 GB Fully Buffered DDR-2 RAM
• 2x 300GB 15,000 RPM hard drives
• 350 io/sec
• Fully Redundant RAID-1
• Battery-backed write-cache enabler
• 1GB Network switch
• 2 TB Monthly transfer

Those are 15K RPM SAS drives so I/O performance should be excellent. Despite the solid hardware specs a main attraction will be getting all that power while working through Media Temple, a company that does a very good job at making hosting as painless as possibe. What's the rub? Well, things start at $750 a month, so the Nitro system is not cheap. You could get one or two managed dedicated systems for that much at another reputable host, but you would miss out on some of the Media Temple frills- something that might not be as important to a professional server administrator. This deal is going to appeal mainly to sites that are on the dv system and are looking to upgrade without leaving Media Temple. They might pull in some new business we well, as they have been doing a very good job lately, but in this price/performance range they are competing with companies like Rackspace and Datapipe and are trying to attract sites who have full-time admins on board, so it is a big step for them (despite their previous experience in this segment). One important issue will be that of support. From what I have seen, Media Temple's support ticket system is quite slow, so this will not be acceptable for site's paying this much money and who are lose out on hundreds or thousands of dollars for every hour down. My only experience with their support is through the Grid, so maybe the dv/Nitro (or just the Nitro) customers have their own support staff who can respond more quickly. I don't know this to be true but it would make sense to keep these customers happy as they are high profile sites that bring in a lot of new customers (just look for that Media Temple logo on sites like TechCrunch or Read/Write Web) and they can easily afford to move to a fully-manage hosting service.