Dreamhost

[giza]

Anyone ever used them? Have comments on their service?

I'm considering them for a new high volume project I am working on, and I'm curious about their service levels/tech support, etc.

Thanks.

Comments

[oryx.livejournal.com]

One site I work on is on dreamhost - as far as their service goes, the client is very happy. As far as technical goes, it's pretty damn good.

They have a control panel that you use to enable and disable features on your website and your application needs. I was able to use the control panel to easily create a shell account so that I could get in and patch some of his site's applications.

Oryx

I know this doesn't answer your question...but...

[mrtroy.livejournal.com]

I use Acenet(http://www.ace-host.net) they've been nothing but great to me. Their tech support is awesome and I think it may end up being a better deal for you. 500 GBs of space and 5 TB of bandwidth for about the same price (If you sign up for a year with Acenet it's 2 dollars cheaper a month)

Just thought I'd throw that out there. :)

Re: I know this doesn't answer your question...but...

[giza.livejournal.com]

I don't see UNIX shells offered on their services page. :-(

[jessypie.livejournal.com]

All I know is that Susie of boygirlparty.com - she is a pretty respected artist & runs a store through her website - got really fed up with Dreamhost awhile back. She used to post to her LJ a lot about the problems she was having, and she eventually switched away. I found this thread (http://www.theswitchboards.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22534&sid=c4e067a09a77c599c6bd15687f73137a) on a message board where Susie makes a few posts explaining why she didn't like Dreamhost.

I know that's just one person's experience, and I don't think I've heard anyone else mention their experience with Dreamhost one way or the other, but Susie had so many frustrations with them that I always cringe when I hear people mention Dreamhost. She may have just had a particularly bad experience there, but since you're talking about a high-volume project, you might find yourself in a boat similar to hers at Dreamhost, I don't know.

[onyx-snowfoot.livejournal.com]

I use dreamhost for my personal website and in the last 4 years I've only had one period of 4 hours of downtime due to my hosted server having a hardware failure, they got me back up quick and credited me for the lost day.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Some of those complaints are frustratingly vague. :-( For example, did these people have the least expensive plan and constantly exceed their bandwidth quotas? Did they have poorly behaved scripts? Did they mess with their DNS settings and break something? Did they have DNS hosted offsite and have an issue with the glue records? My experience in the computer industry has taught me that there are a great many things that can go wrong with any kind of hosting, and that sometimes the solutions to these problems may be very elusive. Anyway...

One of the things that I liked about Dreamhost is that they seemed okay with large volume usage of MySQL, even going so far as to explain what constitutes "good" usage in their Wiki (http://wiki.dreamhost.com/KB_/_Web_Programming_/_CGI%2C_PHP%2C_and_Databases_/_MySQL_/_Conueries).

FWIW, I checked out some of the hosts that were mentioned in that thread, and I saw that some of them actually did shady things like this (http://www.lunarpages.com/desc/ssl_certificate.htm) in their hosting plans. So, yeah...

Thanks for the input. I have the feeling that there will be no easy answers here.

[pyesetz]

Company Γ used to have its website on DreamHost.  I moved them to WestHost because DH couldn't seem to figure out how to add me as a second administrator.  Also WestHost offers "virtual private servers" (XEN or similar), which really makes it feel like you own the machine rather than being a guest on someone else's.  Want to make a change that isn't supported by their control-panel webpage?  Just edit the underlying config file, as if you owned the machine!

[giza.livejournal.com]

VPSes mean that I have to do administration work, keep my own copy of Apache up to date, etc. Not something I'm interested in doing.

[jessypie.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have no idea who any of the other people in that thread are besides Susie (boygirlparty) and definitely wouldn't suggest that you should take advice from any of them. And I don't know what Susie's arrangement was with Dreamhost - all I can say there is that she seems very smart and business-minded and that it sounds like she really did try to work things out with Dreamhost before finally giving up on them. Like I said, that's not a lot to go on, but I remember it seemed like she was having problem after problem with them for months, and that's probably worth knowing if you're considering using them for a major site.

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

Remember all the problems we had with them with some victims who were being harassed by their users? They did NOTHING to help the victims. I would not recommend them.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Please refresh my memory on this, but didn't they suggest the victims contact attorneys or law enforcement on those matters?

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

That was their answer to them instead of removing the harassing comments, copyrighted photos, etc. They didn't abide by their own TOS to end the harassment before it got really nasty. Which it did. I wouldn't touch Dreamhost with a 10-foot pole.

[giza.livejournal.com]

I can see the logic in that... if they went onto a customer's website and started removing things, this could create legal liability by making them into an "editor" instead of a "publisher".

More importantly, if they are served with a DMCA complaint, then they can remove the offending content without incurring legal liability under the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. At least that's my understanding of how this works.

If you want to continue the discussion, we might want to consider moving it to a more private fora due to the fact that cases are being discussed.

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

Nope. Don't need to. You asked for an opinion. I gave it. Just my two cents. And it wasn't just the one case. We've had numerous problems with Dreamhost. Wouldn't touch them.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

I think you know that I just switched to them. I was happy with the signup process and like the services they offer, but haven't been with them long enough to comment further.

[jdarkwulf.livejournal.com]

Well, consider this an anecdote for when things don't go exactly right. I've had a Dreamhost hosting package for a bit over a year, because of the space and bandwidth allowances (that grow as you remain a customer). However, as I was getting my site set up, I started running into some scripting problems, and my site was using more CPU time than they were comfortable with.

Their support was actually helpful, understanding, and patient. Once the problem was brought to my attention, it took a couple of weeks of configuration tweaking to get things under control, and not once did they threaten or pressure me. When I commented on this to the support rep I had been corresponding with, he said that the progress I was making, as well as the correspondence I was sending, showed that I was making a good-faith effort to fix things.

It's a little depressing that common courtesy like that strikes me as extra-classy these days, but a lot of companies have zero patience.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Awesome, that's good to hear!

FWIW, I've had similar experiences with NearlyFreeSpeech (http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/) on other projects in the past when things broke -- they were willing to work with me to fix the problem.

[jdarkwulf.livejournal.com]

It's kind of funny, too; about three weeks after I finished tweaking the issue, they decided to drop CPU usage restrictions. D'oh! :)

[taral.livejournal.com]

They had a rough spot about a year ago due to rapid expansion combined with a really crappy datacenter provider. :( This has since been fixed.

If you don't have an account with them already, get one from someone with a referral code -- it gets you significantly increased caps. :)

I don't use them for much, but the few times I've had problems they've been very prompt about keeping me informed. I particularly like their ticket creation bit -- you tell them what site/service/username is having trouble, and they automatically crossreference it with their open tickets. :)

[nidonocu.livejournal.com]

I'm with them right now so I could do the whole referral code thing with you. :)

I've had pretty good service with them:
* Online customer service has always been friendly and helpful.
* Downtime is rare, I think I can think of one to three times since I started with them in the last two years that I couldn't access my site when I needed to. This was restored within a few hours. They keep a rolling feed now of maintenance work and outages.
* Control Panel and built in services are very useful. Built in installers and upgraders for WordPress, MediaWiki, Joombla and others.

Thus I happily recommend them. :)

[fordarkness.livejournal.com]

i agree with netcrimes on this. abusers and harassers intentionally go to dreamhost because of the fact that they claim they'll remove stuff only with a court order. i can understand the "editor" versus "publisher" concept, but you know as well as i do that in cases of clearcut harassment and stalking, ISPs have a ToS that they're supposed to follow and don't need a court order to remove violations of it. dreamhost does not stand behind the ToS at all... very obvious cases of harassment are left to stay up there, including photos of victims, personal information, contact information, etc. it's not being an editor when you remove obvious cyberstalking violations... it's standing behind the ToS that says "you will not use our service to harass others". they don't stand behind that at all.

i agree with netcrimes... i wouldn't go near them no matter what kind of perks they offered me.

*****

[cuprohastes.livejournal.com]

Dreamhost have been the most reliable and honest hosts I've ever used. If you go with them I'll hand you a voucher to waive the setup fee.
THey have an RSS feed of their status - and they'll tell you which individual machines are being worked on, and why. You can aslo get an RSS feed of the machine you're being hosted on.
They also tend towards customer care, and provide a lot of tools for TEH NOOBZ to mess with, as well as direct shell acess and FTP for people with m4d haxx0r l337n355, and will allow you to host multiple domains and sub domains. there's no SQL database limit either.