Drupal + MediaTemple hosting (?)

I have a drupal site at Mediatemple...

No Drupal-specific issues on their "gs" plan... Just general outage/availability issues, and some slowness whenever the site isn't being constantly accessed. Basically, it takes a while to "warm up" on the grid, so it's best for sites with some* amount of steady traffic.

That said, there are some upgrades (including getting your own dedicated MySQL server instance for an addition $20/month) that should resolve the rest of the issues.

Other than that, no problems with Drupal on PHP5... Oh yeah, they don't seem to support MySQL 5, so that's a big deal for some...

If you can afford the SQL Container it will help likely, it'll analyze slow queries and whatnot and reserves dedicated resources to the instance of the server. You may need the pro version tho.

On the drupal side i've never had a problem, they are pretty reliable, but for some things you'll need to make sure you put your session.save_path to your data/tmp folder or you may experience some interesting "grid" behavior akin to a time machine.

When You say cache table that grows by 600Mb weekly, is it in aggressive mode? maybe turn it down a little, or find something to clear cache tables via cron?

Please keep in mind that in the MySQL SmartPool v2 system there is a 4GB limit to total database size: http://kb.mediatemple.net/article.php?id=659

From what you're describing in regards to the scale of your operations I'd say you should probably start off with the $20 Lite container right away, which also has the 4gb storage limit for your database, but can be upgraded* to the Pro (6GB) or Advanced (8GB) packages in minutes from our AccountCenter interface. The higher-level containers also provide more RAM for increased performance and capacity. As the other users stated in this thread earlier, there are also tools to generate a slow query log which can provide a lot of insight on further optimizing your database performance or finding troublesome queries.

We have quite a number of Drupal users on our (gs) Grid-Service platform. We even have it as a 1-click install option (the others being zen-cart and wordpress) . You said you're planning on porting an existing setup, so that wouldn't really apply to you, but we're definitely a Drupal-friendly host nonetheless.

Our latest PHP versions are:
PHP4: 4.4.7
PHP5: 5.2.2

MySQL: 4.1.11

Hopefully this should give you some more solid info to work with. Good luck on your research! =)

*Pricing on all of our MySQL containers can be found here: http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/mysql-containers.htm

Arman Z. - (mt) Media Temple, Inc. - http://www.mediatemple.net/