I was lately asked by a feed-email subscriber, which among the two webhosts, Media Temple (MT) and Dreamhost (DH), should I recommend to her. What she want is a reliable webhost with better tech support but is cheap or affordable.

For me, these two web hosts are both reliable, with better tech support and are both affordable. You couldn’t blame me if that’s how I look at the both of them because what I said is based on my observation and experience.

But of course I know that there are people who are not contented with the web hosting services offered by Dreamhost. The same is true to Media Temple. If you’ll search the internet for “Media Temple Review” and “DreamHost Review” you’ll find lots of negative reviews about them. And those reviews are based on what they also experienced with the web hosts.

In other words, the answer to the question mentioned above depends on the one who answer it. If you’ll ask an unsatisfied customer of DreamHost, then I know that he’ll tell you that DreamHost sucks. And if you’ll ask the satisfied customer of Dreamhost, you’ll be told that Dreamhost is the best webhost. This is also true to the Media Temple.

However, to help her decide which among the two webhosts, Media Temple and Dreamhost,  should she buy a web hosting account, … here’s my few observations regarding each of the two webhosts.

Media Temple

Media Temple offers three different web hosting solutions:

1. Grid Hosting for $20/mo. It has hundreds of servers working in tandem. I couldn’t really explain how the servers are connected. But what I understand is that your single website is driven by the hundreds of servers. Once a visitor visit your site, the data downloaded by his computer are coming from these servers. So, in this way, opening your website is faster compared to when your website is hosted by a single but shared server. But of course, the resources of these servers are shared by the websites hosted by them.
2. Dedicated Virtual ($50/mo, $100/mo and $150/mo). It is also called Private Server by the DreamHost or VPS (Virtual Private Server) by other web host or VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) by few other web hosts. You can easily adjust your server depending on your needs. But there are only three options: Base ($50/mo), Rage ($100/mo) and Extreme ($150/mo).
3. Dedicated Physical Virtual for $750/mo. Other webhost called this as Dedicated Server. It’s a single server being rented by a single client.

DreamHost

DreamHost offers us three solutions too:

1. Shared Server. It’s a single server hosting hundreds or perhaps thousands of websites and accounts. The server’s resources are being shared by all the websites hosted by it.
2. DreamHost PS with MySQL in shared server. Your website’s files and Database are hosted by two different servers. Your website’s main files are placed in your VPS while the databases are hosted in a shared server. The price of it is $1/10mb of memory plus the standard shared hosting price. The memory allocation can be adjusted in realtime from 150mb to the maximum.
3. DreamHost PS with MySQL PS. Your account is actually using two different servers. A VPS for your website’s files and another PS for your databases. The price for each of the DreamHost PS and MySQL PS is $1/10mb memory but has 20% discount plus the standard share hosting price.

Comparison

1. Grid Hosting of Media Temple is faster than the DreamHost shared hosting. Except of course if most of the servers in the Grid Hosting that are serving your websites are down.
2. In DreamHost shared hosting, if the server is down, you couldn’t access your site. While in Media Temple Grid, you can access your site even if almost all servers in a group or cluster are down as long as there is 1 server running.
3. Upgrading your Grid Hosting to Dedicated Virtual in Media Temple takes few time but if you’ll upgrade your shared hosting in DreamHost to PS, the process takes days.
4. DreamHost PS is cheaper and affordable compared to Media Temple’s Dedicated Virtual.
5. In DreamHost, you can adjust the memory allocation for your PS account from 150mb above up to the maximum limit in realtime. In Media Temple’s Dedicated Virtual, you can upgrade your account from Base to Rage or to Extreme or vice versa in realtime.
6. In MediaTemple, if you want to resell hosting plans to your own clients, your clients will use a control panel for their own account only. While in DreamHost you are the only one who can access the accounts because there are no separate control panel that your own clients can use.

There are lots of differences between MediaTemple and DreamHost. If you know something, please feel free to share through our comment section.

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