So a while back, I identified that Drupal can run incredibly slow on MediaTemple's Grid Service. It's otherwise a great hosting plan that I've been very happy with. SSH access, easy to configure with additional domains, scales well. Of course I forgot about this as I did my Drupal conversion, but it looks like there's a fix.

In this, my first screencast, I perform a basic speedtest of a Drupal 7 site on MediaTemple and BlueHost.

Over the years I've been very happy with my hosting provider, MediaTemple. They have some unique product offerings, their documentation is extensive, and their support teams are incredibly helpful. Not only that, but I live just a few short miles from their offices and datacenter, and I love to suppport local businesses.

However, Drupal has some specific needs when it comes to MySQL support, where it appears MediaTemple's Grid Service shared hosting plan is just not up to snuff. This screencast shows the results of my speedtest comparisons as I access the exact same Drupal 7 site installed on both MediaTemple and BlueHost.

I was trying to override the login block displayed on one of my Drupal sites and I kept running into a lot of trouble. No matter what functions I tried overriding in my template.php, nothing was displaying. All the tutorials I could find online didn't take into consideration the specifics of using a Zen subtheme. Hopefully my guide here will avoid this problem.