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If you’re seeing this, you’re hitting the blog on the new Media Temple server. I finally decided to move over from Dreamhost after being fed up of slow load times, frequent outages, general quirkiness, etc. However, Dreamhost isn’t as bad as everyone makes it sound. Here’s why Dreamhost kicks ass:

1. Great support! I mean REALLY GREAT support! I feel bad for their support team because of how many downtime related issues that they have to deal with, but I’ve never had a complaint gone unanswered to the extent I requested. They are knowledgeable, kind and go that extra step of the way. Put another way, the only reason I didn’t leave Dreamhost before was because of their great support.
2. Really slick one-click installs. Another reason which kept me going for 2 years. Sometimes, you just want to install or upgrade something without any fuss. Dreamhost keeps track of the version you’re currently running for each one-click installed software and their upgrades are seamless and I’ve never lost any data.
3. Cost per feature. You can’t beat their prices, at least not for what they offer. They’re cheap and they have 80% of the features you’ll ever want (except for the 20% for the power users).
4. Good control panel. Not great, but definitely good. They went the Ajaxy way a couple of months, but realized how horrible it was, and I’m glad they changed back to a stable control panel

I’ve seen a lot of posts which boast about the features of their new webhost, but for me, there were only three things I really cared about – flexibility, uptime and responsiveness. Media Temple has all those and that’s all I care about. I didn’t change because MT has a great set of features or the best price on the market, but they have stable servers and they serve my pages as fast as I’ve optimized them.

But in case you do care about the research between Dreamhost and Media Temple, here are a few good reads:

• Why I chose MediaTemple – One Digital Life
• Mediatemple’s gridserver *is* much faster than Dreamhost – Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease
• Media Temple Grid Server thoughts – 5tags