Media Temple (dv) v The Planet Dedicated

In the last few months, I have spent some time trying to find an optimum hosting solution for small to mid market client hosting. Previous posts have discussed cloud based hosting on Media Temple’s Grid-Service (gs) and its advantages (scalability) and shortcomings (speed). For a time, I moved this site and others to Media Temple’s Dedicated-Virtual (dv) package; a Linux VPS with better overall performance and more flexible configuration options.

Although VPS provides for a reserved allocation of system resources, I was still unhappy with the potential performance bottlenecks presented by only 512 Mb of RAM and the lack of flexibility this provides for sites with a potential for traffic spikes. With this in mind, I have been testing dedicated hardware based at The Planet to host those sites that would benefit from more enterprisey architecture.

In summary, the pros and cons of VPS v Dedicated are listed below.

The case for dedicated at The Planet

• Command line (SSH) flexibility offers granular control of your server and you learn more about configuration than you ever would using cPanel/Plesk
• Ping times and general latency are improved, particularly with a 100 Mbs port
• Support response times at The Planet are significantly better than Media Temple
• Uptime has been 100% (as it was at Media Temple, although not for everyone)
• Network performance has been strong whereas Media Temple had periodic ‘upstream’ issues
• Hardware pricing is now very competitive
• RAID disk protection
• Integrated backup solution

The case for (dv) at Media Temple:

• Command line admin has a reasonably steep learning curve
• Budget dedicated servers are still at least twice the price of a VPS
• DNS zone admin not to be undertaken lightly
• Apache/PHP set up is labour intensive and you will need to apply patches and updates
• Technical support is geared for power users
• Most dedicated hosting is billed in USD. Bad for Canadian customers (at the time of writing)
• Risks of hardware failure probably higher – cloud based architecture inherently safer

Worth mentioning alongside Media Temple and The Planet is Slicehost. The Slicehost architecture is advanced and they are well funded as part of Rackspace. We have run several in house projects and dev sites at Slicehost and have been very impressed. The interface is command line only and you will need to build your own LAMP stack. For the uninitiated, this is easier than it sounds.

Slicehost’s support articles are particularly well written and so far, the hardware and network have been 100%. Slicehost is positioned as a scalable solution aimed at developers rather than a prdocution environment but from what we have seen, they are just as reliable if not more so than the average VPS host. It remains to be seen whether or not they want to enter into the mass market and personally, I hope they don’t.

In summary, if you are reselling hosting or have site(s) that attract more than a few hundred users a day, VPS may prove limiting unless you invest in a top of the line package. You can secure a reasonable low end dedicated box from around $80 a month and this is likely to provide you with at least 1Mb of RAM which is the very least you will need in order to support WordPress/Expression Engine/Drupal or run Ruby or Django frameworks. If you spend $150, you should be able to secure 2Mb of RAM, a better front side bus and faster disks. If you know how to configure RAID, then you will be able to incorporate a level of protection that is absent in most VPS systems. However, if you are running a small business site, a personal blog or for whatever reason you don’t have the time or inclination to be your own server admin, then Media Temple is still the way to go.