Dreamhost sucky

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)

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/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2795126&Sku=TSD-500AAKS
$430 for a decent brand new 1U

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2945450&CatId=1205
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.