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.

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.