Media Temple launched a major new hosting service this morning called Grid Server. It matches low end shared hosting services in pricing ($20/month) but promises to grow along with the site, manage huge short term traffic spikes without a disruption in service or performance and avoid the “bad neighbor” problem common with shared hosting services. The basic $20 package includes 100 GB of storage, 1 TB of bandwidth and up to 100 individual sites.
Customer sites are not hosted on a single (dedicated, shared or virtual) machine. Instead, they are managed by hundreds of clustered servers, and Media Temple monitors the health of the entire grid as well as individual sites. If a site spikes in traffic, performance is unaffected and the site owner will simple be charged for overage on bandwidth and CPU usage. If the grid begins to get stressed, Media Temple simply adds more machines.
More at Tech Crunch.