Dreamhost sucky

Yeah they are getting even worse lately, I'm happy I didn't go with them some time back when I was told by a friend that I should as they were great... he even had some promo codes but for some reason they just didnt seem to be the right ones for me.. glad I didnt! :)

For a while I was hearing lots of great stuff about Dreamhost. In fact, I almost switched to them myself. However, as time has gone on, they've gotten worse and worse as more people have signed up. I'm glad I stuck with 1&1.

Have to jump on the complaint train and call out my host, 1&1, for extremely poor customer service. They used to be very responsive but they have deteriorated in the past year.

Recently I tried to cancel a set of Exchange services, and instead they cancelled my personal domain. In so doing they knocked out my personal e-mail for 3 weeks while they fumbled around with the problem. I eventually had to switch e-mail providers and fix the problem myself.

I use Webfaction - http://www.webfaction.com

Their support is *incredible*. I'm very pleased with them, and they're great for web applications as well as blogs/websites etc.

My company uses DreamHost for all our Subversion stuff. We have had them for about a month. We haven't really had a problem.

Our main web stuff is hosted with UltimaHosts. They are the best .NET hoster! They also do PHP & MySQL if you are into that.

photonhosting.net is small but has been great for me for like 3 years.

er, photonhosting.com

I've always been really, really impressed with media temple but the price point didn't work out for me when I was just starting up with my stuff, whereas the appeal of 10$ @ dreamhost for the first year of hosting and domain is so... appealing that I think many, like me, couldn't really resist it, especially if it is not known how long you might be sticking it out online. If my revenue amps up I may try to partially migrate but the problem is that I'm now rather entrenched.

Which is exactly how they like it, of course.

So that explains what happened to 1938media.com since yesterday morning.

Dreamhost is terrible, I know a friend who's with them and I've been trying to get him to convert for awhile. I use MediaTemple and haven't had any problems in the time I've been with them.

If you want to sign up for (mt), you can use the link below which would help me out, I think I get an account credit for each sign up.

http://www.mediatemple.net/go/order/?refdom=mic...

If not, just go to mediatemple.net.

I use gotping.com. They're a new company, don't even have a proper site up yet, but so far they've been an excellent host. You're assigned a personal tech with direct access to them in case there's any problems with your account.

I'm a happy Dreamhost customer for over two years now.

Yes, I've had some outages (not many) - but I'm not using this for business purposes.

Here's a hint: If you're running a company, and you're going to rely on your hosting to give a demo - don't be a freaking cheap-ass. Get a dedicated, or virtual-private server, with an actual SLA.
Yes, that means you need to spend more than USD$100/month on hosting.

We use dreamhost for a year now and didn't have any mayor problem since then.

I have never really used dreamhost but my friends say that they are very good. I have not read many blogs recently about dreamhost being bad.

@James Boike: I will say in regards to 1&1, I've heard bad about their Windows services. I've had great luck with the Linux based services though.

robert, the problem is that DH is one of the few hosting companies that offer a lot of "geeky stuff" for 8usd/month with unlimited domains... so a lot of people goes there just to discover that "you get what you pay for" ;)

BTW, its not so easy to get reliable and unbiased advice on hosting

Despite what mariano says, DreamHost is one of the BEST and CHEAPEST webhosts around. You have to understand that when you have 100 of thousands of customers that you are going to have a mess up once and a while. Just look at how many people get screwed by Microsoft yet we all still stick witht them.

Robert, in my opinion this post is beneath you. You have no first hand experience with this service, and therefore, all you are doing is repeating rumors. I'm embarrassed for you. This is not the kind of thing I read your blog to see. You can do better than this.

I've been with Dreamhost now for three or four years and I average a few hours of outages per year - that's not bad for $10-$20 a month on unlimited domains and good technical features.

It's maybe not the wisest decision to host a business on a $10/month server...

Perry: you're wrong. I had a CEO here today of a startup company who's service is down -- I might not have personal experience with this service, but he does -- sorry I can't name him but he doesn't want to hurt his chances of getting funding, which is why he's in the Valley today. His service is down all day. He's not the only one complaining. Go look at Google Blogsearch.
This is NOT a rumor!

I switched from Dreamhost to a Slicehost 256slice last year and haven't looked back. It's a VPS using Xen which means you get full root access and guaranteed memory/CPU. For $20 bucks a month, it's unbeatable. Basically like a dedicated server except cheaper. At one point they had a 3-month waitlist due to demand.

re #20:
Robert, the visiting CEO is quite right in not wanting to be named.

I sure as heck wouldn't be investing in a company that's too cheap to buy proper hosting for a business/commercial site.

Will: well, it's a pre-funding startup. Zooomr isn't the only one. It's just rare that you hear about these situations, that's all.

I'm a happy dreamhost customer for 3 years and host multiple sites with them. I rarely have outages longer then a few minutes. They offer a ton of features that are perfect for tech geeks and are very transparent about their problems.

With over 500,000 domains there are bound to be issues, and we all know that users who've had bad experiences will generally be very vocal...

Dreamhost is okay for the average site. I agree with Will, though - they shouldn't be hosting with Dreamhost. You can get *better* (not great) hosting for $20 a month. Skimping to $5 a month is just too risky.

@Ben: Well Windows you can argue you don't want to give up because of certain software and other things, even though there are alternitives... I'm a Linux user myself. However, considering that there are other hosts with the same, if not more, features, it doesn't make sense to stick with them by any means.

Robert: You've worked at Microsoft. Google their name and see how many complaints you get. I bet at least a few hundred, if not thousand, complaints are about severely negative business issues like the one you describe. More customers means a higher volume of complaints.

But since you are so vocal on this today, what services do you suggest? You can't knock one without having others to name as being better. I should say I'm not a "happy Dreamhost customer" but I am evaluating several options right now. Aside from a few places like Textdrive that just cost ridiculous amounts of money I haven't found a good alternative to Dreamhost that doesn't have nearly as many customer complaints. But I would be happy to hear your suggestions.

All my sites are hosted in Dreamhost. There isn't down time today.

More info:

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

I have used Domainmonger.com hosting for 7 years for many many domains. Never had a site down, and fantastic customer service.

I had similar problems with NoMontlyFees.com. They were fantastic the first few years and then I started to see regular outages. It wasn't trivial for me to switch hosts so I can imagine it's very difficult for a company to do so. But after one long outage I moved my site to Bluehost.com and have been so much happier. It's a bit more expensive but worth every penny.

I think I heard of Dreamhost through your blog a little more then a year ago when thwy were blogging about some problems? We checked around and heard that they were good and used them. We've had a few problems but nothing huge.

I have been a digital.forest customer in one way or another for years and years. They aren't the cheapest, (check http://forest.net/ for info), but they care about their infrastructure, and since I've been using them for bynkii.com, i've had less than 5 hours of d.f.-caused downtime since I put the site up.

Their support is excellent, and when you call them, you *get someone*. No "email us and we might get back to you" bullshit. They have a maintenance blog that they keep current, etc.

Just top - notch all the way around, and that's for shared space or colocation.

I've got dreamhost hosting a number of different domains and I have had no trouble. They're pretty big now, so if they have an issue somewhere it can affect a number of people.

At any rate - there is not one 'large' shared, cheap webhost that doesn't have its fair share of negative blog posts. And for their prices vs their overall uptime and feature set, its an amazing bargain.

And like others have said - blogs and personal sites are one thing to be hosted on a shared server - if you are serious about constant uptime and SLA, you have to pay more. Period.

As other people have pointed out, there is no unbiased advice when it comes to hosting. We use Dreamhosts for our arts trail site (http://sbaweb.co.uk) because they are cheap and offer unlimited domain hosting. We have had a little downtime but nothing more than we have experienced from other hosting companies. Mostly I like them because they are friendly, listen to what the customers (mainly geeks) want, and tries to provide that service. Dont spoil it by dissing them, they get it, even if their servers dont!

Slam by proxy...

It's simple math, more marketshare, means more issues, even while the overall per capita stats, might be good. You have to put random bloggerria searches in context, with a whole set of external factors. Plus, one or two vocal loudmouth crybaby bloggers (oh say Jeff Jarvis), makes the problem seem much larger than it is. One slighted blogger, with the ego of God, bitches up a storm, and everyone chimes in...and in time, the linkage and whole context gets lost. Enter some dweeb doing a blog search and wow, evil company.

Plus, as others have said, if mission critical, go seriously dedicated server, being a start-up is a feeble excuse. Sucks to be him, but if in a biz, you always need a back-up slash disaster recovery plan. Ones that don't, well, aren't.

Hosting an important site on a shared host is just silly. I have had several sites (blogs, personal sites, etc) hosted with dreamhost for a round 3 years. I am REALLY happy with what I get for the money. The killer ap for me is ssh access. Running websites without ssh causes too many maintenance headaches, but with ssh everything is a breeze. You just don't get similar features for anywhere near the price elsewhere.

Highly Recommended

This isn't dreamhosts fault - they offer a CHEAP service and anyone wanting to create a viable business who uses an $8 a month hosting service deserves whatever they get. Pay the money and get the right service, in the web world the host *IS* everything.

Personally I say carry on dreamhost, great service for the money.

I use dreamhost for almost 2 years...It's not that bad (touchwood!) The pricing and the features works for me.They are quite responsive and most importantly it has big user base, unlike my prev hosting company - hence I feel quite secure to store data there. The community will help it to improve. (Now, their control panel is much sleeker) :P

If he's on your show, shouldn't he have his own server?

Just a thought.

I can but shake my head in mild despair at this post.

Dreamhost offer a cheap, functional and impressively full-featured service for very little money. It's extremely suitable for people hosting personal sites, messing around or running non-critical applications.

That's what they are and what I think everyone understands them to be. For a huge number of people that's all they need from a web host. I had 3 days email downtime from them once last year, and it made me think about getting a dedicated IMAP host for mail (I didn't in the end, and it's been fine ever since) but everyone above who says you get what you pay for is completely right.

Your ‘CEO of a start-up’ has simply made a catastrophic business decision not to invest in his own product. Trying to defend him by blaming his consumer-level webhost and trying to incite a lash of criticism is just pathetic.

If you're trying to run a business, you should know what you're paying for. Clearly he doesn't, so I wish him well in his next endeavour.

We host all of sitespaces.net and a huge popular message board website, plus our business site all on a tiny cable modem with a visionman dual core tower. All we have to do is pay the cable internet bill that we would have to pay for anyway.

[beerco@localhost ~]$ ping sitespaces.net
PING sitespaces.net (69.70.72.211) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from modemcable211.72-70-69.static.videotron.ca (69.70.72.211): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.49 ms

Having the machine in your office is priceless.
Getting a fiber optic line is better but costs 6k per month. When you need a little more, and you are IN THE BUSINESS, you should personally know the folks at the datacenter in the nearest city. I know a bunch of people at Canix in Montreal. When I put up our newest creation, and boy will Google be shocked. I can have it on our own 1U on coloc for only $69 a month with a TB of band.

For a VC funded startup anything less is lunacy.

Scoble, I've been a satisfied Dreamhost customer for 2+ years now. Sure, I've experienced a little downtime, but Dreamhost is what it is -- a cheap web host that offers a crapload of options for less than $10 a month. It's shared hosting... I use it for personal sites, sites for family members, and little coding experiments.

I wouldn't hinge my business, nor would I host any web app of business value, on a shared web host. Not once I was past the "see-what-I-can-do" phase, and into the "can-this-be-profitable?" phase.

I think Dreamhost receives a lot of flack for being very transparent -- their status page tracks when services are down and they blog about the problems they encounter. Thus, when there are problems, people know about them, talk about them, blog about them. But I don't think Dreamhost offers a lesser service than any other $10/month host.

I also use WebFaction and it's by far the best customer support I've ever seen. I've been with them for 6 months and haven't seen any downtime !

I've been using Dreamhost for a couple years now and have had nary a problem. I agree with others, it's silly to try to run a business from a budget host. I host several domains with them, but it is ludicrous to think that I could run the heart of any business from them. It really is consumer grade, a great value, that's it.

Speaking of hosting issues, I've been having issues with GoDaddy for a long time now. Main issue being their server automatically disconnecting my FTP connection over and over during transfers and slower than usual (other sites in America) access and load times from Norway where I'm based.

If your CEO wants to go professional, I put together a little package for him.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchT...
$430 for a decent brand new 1U

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchT...
plus 2 500 GB hdds for 1TB storage at $119 a piece

http://iweb8.com/colocation/
plus $69 a month coloc at iWeb.
It includes a dedicated reboot. It's only 500 GB, but unless you're serving video, you'll never exceed it.

You can throw Ubuntu or FC7 on there and use LAMP as Scoble does. Now you have a brand new enterprise class setup for far under $1000. If you don't have that kind of money, you should consider getting another job until you have the funds to do your startup.

I also want to add that I had a $12,000 Sun Microsystems Netra T4 server at Canix for months late last year and earlier than this year, and it performed NO BETTER than the cheap $400 cybertron and $800 visionman servers. As a matter of fact it was far worse than our visionman Intel dual core. Sun, Dell, ect... spray you with doubletalk. Go cheap and make backups using 2 drives if you do web apps. It won't make a bit of difference if you invest more in pricey hardware.

Although I don't use Dreamhost for my main site, I did plenty of due diligence before deciding on them as a host for my forums. I've found their staff nothing but helpful and the ration of complaint and downtime not out of the unusual.

There is one thing that will cause me to switch to another provider when my contract is over. While the server space is generous the processor allotment is not. If you get digg'd or /.'d you'll quickly go over their alloted processor amount. This will result in a warning and if it's not corrected (essentially you have to take your website down) they'll terminate your service. That can be a problem if you're trying to run a business, not just a hobby site.

Dreamhost are cheap. For the money, they are great. In fact, for the money, they are wonderful.

Want a genuinely reliable service?

Go somewhere else, and pay more.

I and a lot of others, including Cali Lewis of Geek Brief and Dear Cali, have been happily using DreamHost for years. And we recommend DreamHost to our friends. They're really great.

http://www.dearcali.com/hosting-services/

It's your friends fault for not having a backup plan. If it was an important presentation and he was pinning it all on a $10 hosting company...well it's irresponsible to pin that on Dreamhost. I worked in an enterprise government environment that spent millions a year to keep webservers running and guess what, we still had outages. It happens, live in reality, have a plan B.

As others said before, if you run a huge hosting business, you are likely to read more about them when they fail - and never really when they are good.

Dreamhost for me is a dream - great support, very fast even on the weekend, ssh, cronjobs and reliable fast webserving. I may have seen 2-3 outage over the last 2-3 years. How many providers really do use a dedicated other server to inform you about what they are doing?

Additionally their one click installs are gorgeus.

And yes, if I have something like that running to present, I make sure to have more than one option up because murphy is always around.

As said, I am a very satisfied customer for what they are costing and delivering.

i like your blog mr scoble - thats why i come here : ) i think the response here shows though that a lot of folks appreciate the cost + features combo that dreamhost offers.

you should have slapped your buddy instead for not setting things up a little more thoughtfully.

Yup my site has gone down again too --cuz of dreamhost

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/05/30/m...

"It’s your friends fault for not having a backup plan. If it was an important presentation and he was pinning it all on a $10 hosting company"

I agree fully with Jon Symons.

If you are going to tote an enterprise system worthy of A-list blogger time, act like it.

I used to run my sites off of a cheapo hosting plan. I don't know what I was thinking. I recently switched to a HostMySite. They are reasonably priced and more than willing to help you with the more complicated aspects of server management. They offer a nice series of options starting with shared accounts and moving up to VPS, servers and multi-server systems depending on your needs.

I mooch off a friend http://www.1337hax0r.com who uses Dreamhost, and we tend to have about 3 hours of downtime every couple months. During the Summer it's attributed to power failures in California during hot days usually. I've considered switching, but my blog isn't a business, so I just suck up the lost hits.

There is a saying you pay for what you get...

oh please, like textdrive and other popular rails hosts are so much better.

I have had a site on DH for several years and a prog to track downtime. I have never had even 1 min. of downtime on the server. On the other hand, my router has to be restarted at least three times a week...
Ya' just never know ??????

I'll have to join the chorus of happy Dreamhost customers. I host about eight sites there and the downtimes have been minimal over the 4+ years I've used and recommended them.

This recent outage was caused by a security breach and it was ugly indeed. But if you host half a million domains (as they apparently do), you attract the attention of the juvenile and criminal elements in our virtual society who think it's cool to destroy other peoples' property.

The perhaps untold story is that in the 2-3 days following this breach, they individually restored a lot of peoples' sites -- including three of mine that were victimized -- with solidly maintained backups that meant few if any real hiccups.

Nobody's perfect, but these guys really shine. You owe them an apology for your initial post, Robert!

I stumbled across your blog because of your post on AIR (Adobe IPhone Runtime, nice) :) Was surprised to see a post about DreamHost sucking. I've been with them for a year now with no problems. But this next month I'm putting up a site for my photography business, what host do you recommend?

Once I left DH for another one. Now I am back. Why? Cos of their style and transparancy. They keep you informed about what is going on there. Even when only 232 people out of 500.000 are affected for 15 minutes, they just let you know. People who use DH for running 20 sites and freak around and having a lot of traffic shouldn't complain when some of their sites are down once in a while. What's eight dollars a month anyway? A cup of coffee, a sandwidth.

I've been using Dreamhost for 2 years, and I haven't had problems.

Dreamhost does publish a remarkably transparent blog, but that's one reason I like them so much.

Dreamhost is the worst hoster I have been with and I was hosted by several US and european companies. I left DH during the money back time I had problems from day one to the point where I had more down then uptime

I love them. If you don't like them perhaps offer an alternative. Don't bash if you don't have a solution.
They have great hosting. And it is cheap!
http://twodayslate.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/dre...

I agree with twodayslate. Dreamhost is certainly not the best but good enough for their price.