As some of you may have noticed from our sidebar, Funtasticus.com is currently hosted by two companies on a couple of different servers. These companies are DreamHost and MediaTemple. In this short review we would like to present our experience with them and the advantages and disadvantages that each of them has which will, hopefully, allow those of you who are looking for reliable hosting to get some insider information about the services that these two companies offer.

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Dreamhost is cheap! For only $5.95 per month DreamHost promises to let you spend as much as 5 Terabytes of traffic. Just think about it. This is actually huge. Funtasticus.com, for example, has approximately 20 000 visitors daily each of them consuming approximately 6-7 Megabytes of traffic per day. This means that every single day this website consumes about 120 - 150 Gigabytes of traffic (which is basically a lot) and this adds up to about 3-4 Terabytes per month! Some sceptics believe that although DreamHost promises to provide 5 Terabytes of traffic per month they would shut down your account if you reach such significant amounts according to some fair usage policy that they may have. However, for about 10+ months of being with DreamHost, we have never been contacted by anyone from there regarding the traffic consumption issues. This pays tribute to DreamHost and we think this company is great if you are just starting your own website and would like to get as much as you can for a small price. This hosting is an absolute “good value for money” thing!

Therefore, if you are just planning to start a new website you may want to choose DreamHost as it is cheap and provides reliable hosting which is absolutely worth it! Here is also a promocode which you can use to get a discount there:

FUNTASTICUS - this codes will give you a maximum possible $50 discount on all hosting plans at DreamHost.

(this code is asked on the sign up page in “Promo Code or email of who referred you:” question)

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MediaTemple which has a stylish website, by contrast, is more expensive and will probably suit slightly more developed websites which require more resources, such as a faster CPU, greater memory and the ability directly control the server. MediaTemple offers a wide range of dedicated and virtual private servers for a reasonable price. The amounts of traffic offered are quite low - from 1 to 2.5 Terabytes for $50 and $150 per month respectively. However, the servers themselves are great. For $50 per month you get a 2.3 Ghz Intel Xeon machine which can handle thousands of visitors per hour or even per minute and still have a 0.05% CPU load (on DreamHost, for example, our website was sometimes overloading the server by 200 - 300%). On MediaTemple our website runs as smoothly as possible.

The reason why we had to spread our website across a number of different servers and companies is simple. The website itself contains thousands of images and pictures which consume a lot of traffic. However, we also needed a powerful machine to be able to handle 20 000 visitors a day (which sometimes rises to 50 and 60 thousand). Therefore, we decided to store our images on DreamHost as the traffic there is really cheap and even if you go over the allocated amount (5 Tb) you’ll be charged only $0.10 per extra Gigabyte you consume. MediaTemple, by contrast, allowed us to get a powerful server which can flexibly adjust to the number of visitors the website gets (a similar server would cost about $230 on DreamHost).

MediaTemple, unfortunately, does not offer any discounts but you can always sign up for one month and see if this is what you need. We personally signed up a couple of months ago and are absolutely loving it.