To avoid any confusion

[giza]

I can no longer recommend Dreamhost for webhosting.

Details to come in a future post.

Comments

[camstone.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm... I sense a disturbance in the force.

[giza.livejournal.com]

No, that was last week:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/15/dreamhost_bills_customers_years_worth_of_trouble/

Compared to that, my experience with Dreamhost is more like a tiny fart in the force.

[simbab.livejournal.com]

That story would seem to validate your earlier comments about autobilling woes. I came very close to getting burned in that fashion by EZpass.

[whyrl.livejournal.com]

That story made me laugh. ;>

[cuprohastes.livejournal.com]

Is this about them sending you an erronous bill for a few hundred dollars?

[giza.livejournal.com]

No. They refunded that right away.

It has more to do with their dozen or so other screwups. Or rather, just the ones I bothered to file trouble tickets on because they lastted longer than half an hour.

[rassah.livejournal.com]

Any comments/opinions in favor or against 1and1.com hosting?

[giza.livejournal.com]

1and1 sucks (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=%221and1+sucks%22&btnG=Search) returns 1,600 matches. :-(

That being said, I have no personal experience with them.

[rassah.livejournal.com]

Wow. That is a google feature I have never thought of using before.

[taral.livejournal.com]

I'm switching most of my stuff to AWS.

[giza.livejournal.com]

I would, but I can't justify the cost. Unless they changed their pricing structure, the pricing would be $72/mo just for the CPU time.

I'm tentatively looking at at Linode (http://www.linode.com/) for their VPSes. Unlike Unixshell, they're more open about I/O issues, and each VPS gets "i/o tokens" that can all be used in a burst, and are replenished slowly. This (in theory) prevents a single user from monopolizing the entire physical machine for too long.

[taral.livejournal.com]

Ah. I don't have any CPU requirements, only static data requirements, so AWS works for me. I'm working on a little project to enable people to get CPU on demand (e.g. per HTTP request) instead of the "get a plot and work it" farm model that EC2 has.

[giza.livejournal.com]

That's something I'd gladly pay money for.

Part of the hosting issue(s) I've had is that Drupal is a full blown app and framework, and takes up way more resources than static webpages. I'd be happy to pay more than what standard webhosting costs, without having to go all the way to a dedicated server. But many of the webhosting companies out there don't seem to "get it". They just want the flood of customers with their blogs or static websites or whatever. Kinda depressing, really.

[pyesetz]

Interestingly enough, giza sucks returns 9 matches (though none of them are obviously you), while pyesetz sucks returns ZERO MATCHES!  Yay, I don't suck at all!  Having a unique name helps...

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I've heard good things about Slicehost's VPS system, which starts at $20 a month. My office has recently gotten two VPSes from A2 Hosting, but I've heard pretty good things about their cheaper web hosting services, too. (They host "43 Folders," a pretty popular web site.)

My currently undead Claw & Quill site is hosted with Joyent; while they're technically very good, they're pretty expensive. (I'm there only because I was an original TextDrive customer, paid for lifetime hosting, and got grandfathered in when Joyent bought them.)

[giza.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I checked them out too.

My concerns are that they have a "waiting list" for certain slices, which annoys me (and makes me feel pressured to buy a more expensive slice, which is a not a good sales tactic)

Also, they seem a little less "community-oriented" than Linode. It's hard to describe, and it's not a bad thing I'm sensing, just a different sort of flavor for how they do things, I guess. That being said, Linode's overall attitude seemed to resonate better with me, so... *shrug*

[taral.livejournal.com]

One of the things I'd like to see is a framework with more "push it to the client" design. Maximizing static content and minimizing CPU requirements is a very effective cost-saver.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Drupal is working towards that with its use of jQuery in Drupal 5, and its caching system first introduced in Drupal 4.

But there are some things that really have to be done server side no matter what, because we both know that you can never trust data coming from the client.

[oryx.livejournal.com]

I'm shocked that you ever recommended their service in the first place! Bad kitty! :)

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

"Geller sucks" returns a blog (or sorts) called Uri Geller Sucks. Ha!

[crywolf.livejournal.com]

I recently became the manager of a small webhosting company. May I email you some info? We have CPanel accounts, FreeBSD jails, and VMWare virtual servers. Drupal and shell access are not a problem. (We're quite fond of Drupal here, actually)

[giza.livejournal.com]

Yes, feel free! I can be reached at anthrocon-2008(AT)anthrocon.org