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April 4th, 2008
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Don’t do it, do even fix it right. Don’t pay Dreamhost

Posted by plattapuss on April 4th, 2008

Short post tonight. Really tired after fighting a long cold and stressful weak. However, I just wanted to say:

Don't do it, Don't even fix it right. Don't pay the Dreamhost man! (ala Chris de Burgh's Ferry man).

I wanted to try a few different hosting companies. Dreamhost looked interesting as it offered SVN repositories, for $8 a month. People said they were pretty good. Well, for the past week or so they have been anything but. They claim a file server is down or something, but all I know is mail doesn't work, server loads run between 10 and 80, SSH works half the time, and my sites take forever to load! Then they post in their server status that the problem is fixed. According to me and all the other posts I read, the problem is still very much there, thank you very much. I post trouble tickets to support and so far out of three requests I have one answer. First post took over 12 hours to answer, second post went missing apparently, and the third post is now at 6 hours about and nothing. (shhh, I think they went out to get drunk.)

If you read Dreamhost's blog, you will see they made a huge accounting error a couple of months ago which they refer to the "Fat finger incident, and they now tell the world that the error has cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or at least that is what I got from the post. And they tell this whole story with humour. So perhaps they are losing their shirts and can't afford to replace their equipment anymore, who knows. All speculation from this frustrated and very 'Out of Control' programmer.

Who knows, maybe after they fix this issue, everything will be perfect!

I wish you all a great weekend and bid you all a G'night! I am off for a cold one.



Reader Comments

Comment:
1
Written by:
Bruce
Posted on:
April 5th, 2008 at 1:02 pm

I recommend WebFaction ( http://www.webfaction.com ). They really try hard to provide some quality hosting and to restore faith in shared hosting…

Comment:
2
Written by:
bestwebhosting
Posted on:
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:20 am

Even the very top high end server would fail one day, I believe dreamhost has done their best.

If uptime really does matter, I would suggest you to go for Dedicated server, the entire server belongs to you.

Good luck in hunting your next host.

Comment:
3
Written by:
plattapuss
Posted on:
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:52 pm

Hi Bestwebhosting,

There is a bit of irony in what you said in your comment. See, I just stopped using my own dedicated servers. I had a few of them and a good pile of clients, but not enough to really make things pay. Up time was clocked in over 99.9% for the past 4 years and I was getting at most 1-2 spam a day, and I have a ton of sites I maintain, so that was good.

Now using other hosting suppliers, which saves me on money from the dedicated, and I have lot more time to do my own gig. Instead I spend a lot of time and frustration dealing with spam and poor server uptime.

So far I have tried 1and1, Bluehost and Dreamhost.

1and1 – perfect if you register a lot of domains and need a ton of fast and dirty little websites with small DB’s. VERY slow control panel. Slow tech reponse time by email, fast response when you call, but I find the level of competence is greatly lacking in phone support.

Dreamhost – by far the prettiest and easiest to use CP, and the fastest too. DH seems to suffering from constant equipment woes at this time. Slow tech response time. Pro’s are SVN repos.

Bluehost – Good service, overloaded servers (though tech support tells me I am wrong), okay CP though confusing at places as you need to jump to different interfaces and areas of BH to do different things. Tech support fast by email and if you can get a level 3 tech support on the phone you are in good hands.

If uptime matters? How could it not! Though I am anal about uptime, fast response time, and zero tolerance on spam (utopian thoughts).

Perhaps though your comment merits some consideration of moving back to a single dedicated server just for my sites.

For dedicated servers I have used 6 different places over the years. ThePlanet for me was always the best so long as you did not need top notch support. If you can manage your box on your own and you know what you are doing, ThePlanet for me offered the best quality network/server and value for my dollar, hands down.

Thanks for the input.

Comment:
4
Written by:
wayne
Posted on:
November 17th, 2008 at 1:12 pm

I recommend taking out one of the special deals with Hostgator like the one at http://www.cheapsitehosting.biz