Web hosting review: Media Temple vs. Dreamhost
Posted March 10, 2009 – 9:14 pm
Some months back before I started this blog, I posted a detailed review of web hosting providers Media Temple and Dreamhost on one of my websites, CallingGuides.com, and on the Drupal.org website (Drupal being the content management platform I use for many of my sites).
The review recounts my experiences with these two web hosting providers and highlights the dramatic performance differences that I saw between them. Basically, Media Temple blew Dreamhost out of the water.
There is a graphic on the post showing the huge reduction in page load times the moment I moved over to Media Temple (graphic is from my Google Webmaster account). Media Temple performance was great then (Sep 08) and it remains great today. I couldn’t be happier.
As noted in the write-up, the comparison is not quite apples-to-apples. With Dreamhost, I had a pretty cheap shared hosting plan for, like, $120 per year for unlimited sites and MySQL databases. Though you can find even cheaper plans elsewhere, the Dreamhost plan I had is typical of the shared plans you can get with many providers, such as Bluehost, among others.
With Media Temple, I skipped past their shared hosting plan and bought their ‘Dedicated Virtual’ hosting plan for about $600 per year (I needed to host way more websites than their shared plan would allow, else I would have tried that).
‘Dedicated virtual’ isn’t quite the same as true dedicated server space, but it is a step above generic shared hosting in that I am guaranteed a certain base level of server availability – whereas with shared hosting, you are subject to peak load problems if everyone is using your server at the same time (which they often are because shared hosting servers tend to be very heavily loaded).
Obviously, $600 is a lot more money than $120, but it is well worth it for me – as I think it would be for most any publisher who is at least semi-serious about their web presence. Of course, if your website traffic and computing load warrants it, you may well need something even more substantial than a $600 plan.
Why is a high performance hosting plan worth the money? Because page load speeds matter hugely to everyone – slow pages loads are bad for visitors, they have a big negative impact on Google SERPs (search engine results pages), and they drive down your advertising revenues. In other words, buying a crappy shared web hosting plan is a penny-wise, pound foolish decision. It appears to save you money, but it really doesn’t. In fact, it could cost you dearly in lost revenue.
How can it reduce your revenues? Here’s how: For your site visitors, slow page loads gets old fast, so they leave quickly – perhaps faster than they might otherwise. This drives up your websites bounce rates (which Google watches very closely) and it reduces the average page views per visitor (which Google also watches closely). That means fewer total page views and, presumably, less clicks on advertisements by your visitors.
It also has an effect on Google and your incoming traffic loads from search. Why? Because Google sees that your site isn’t doing much for your customers – they are leaving fast, perhaps faster than from other related sites they might be visiting to get similar information. So, they drop your site down in the SERPs, perhaps way down, which means fewer people see your site to begin with.
So, if you choose a bad hosting provider that delivers slow page loads, then you get less total traffic from Google and you get fewer pages views from the visitors who do find you – and that translates directly into lower advertising and other revenues.
Since one hopes your website has the potential to generate way, way more than the $450 incremental cost you might save with a cheap shared hosting plan, you really should consider springing for a decent plan from a quality provider.
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If are interested in trying Media Temple, I would be grateful if you would use me as a reference by citing CallingGuides.com in the Referral Domain field during sign up. Or use this link which pre-populates that field.
The raw link: http://www.mediatemple.net/go/order/?refdom=callingguides.com
2 Comments
I’ve been reading a lot about Media Temple lately, and it’s mostly been very, very good.
Idea for a future web article of yours: How does their control panel compare to Dreamhost’s? We love the ease of use with Dreamhost, but yes it’s not up to par with MT’s dedicated virtual for sure.
Good question. I glossed over the whole aspect of ease of use and customer support of the Media Temple and Dreamhost.
Unfortunately, I don’t really do the sys admin part of managing my sites, so I am less familiar with the control panels of each hosting company. From what I understand, Cpanel, which is used by Dreamhost and many hosts, is an easier interface to use – more intuitive and simpler for the regular user.
Media Temple uses Plesk, which looks really nice, but is possibly a bit less user friendly. In our case, we actually bypass Plesk for many tasks and manage our hosting sites directly via Linux. This is great and flexible feature – as long as you have the tech know how to take advantage of it.
It is also quite important to say that with Media Temple’s Dedicated Virtual hosting there is minimal support available. It is primarily a do-it-yourself set-up. Of course, they ensure the servers are working and so forth, but anything to do with configuration and management of your site is your own responsibility.
That said, we didn’t get a whole lot of help out of Dreamhost when we were with them – at least not on the issues that matter most: raw performance. So, there were people there to help, but they weren’t able to actually help that much.