Dreamhost have a pretty bad reputation, but its amazingly good value as long as you understand a few things.
You arent going to be live 24/7, in the 4 years or so ive been with them I have been down 3 times for more than a day, and a few sporadic is it down / is it up moments.
It isnt going to be the fastest connection in the world, mine is reasonably fast, but it has slow moments.
people hosting business critical applications are just asking for trouble.
but past that, you have a lot of preinstalled software, svn takes a minute to set up, ssh access which you can install most things you want on and a silly amount of bandwidth / space. its pretty perfect for a first host, to put a blog up and share images folder etc.
Part of their bad reputation is from how transparent they are, they are honest about when they go down and what the fault is, their sense of humour about everything grates some people, but I appreciate not being given a canned coorporate response
It has been recommended a lot on hacker news before, I didn't realize it had a negative connotation. I just signed up for a year, previously was hosting off a local machine for my personal stuff, for $10 a year I'll make it someone else's problem. We use Engine Yard for our business stuff, but can't beat this for personal.
For personal or non-critical sites, Dreamhost are great.
Their reputation stems from the fact that they publish their issues openly on a blog with comments enabled and zero moderation (dreamhoststatus.com). So the kicking and screaming that goes on when sites are down (and all shared hosts go down about the same on average) is publicly visible. This both damages their reputation compared to hosts without such a public forum for venting, and strengthens it on the honesty side of things too.
I've used them for several years though for non-critical sites and I've been as happy with them as with any other shared host (and I've used quite a few over the years).
I got one of these deals a few years ago... and I'm still with them paying $9.95, per month.
They really get you hooked by giving you the first year for essentially free, and hoping you're just too lazy (like me) to switch after a year.
As for the actual service, I haven't had many problems.
Though I have noticed recently they aggressively cache some things (PHP pages that don't change?), which can make development very difficult. Anyone else notice this? Any workarounds.
Not at all. They are bastards! I haven't used them for about a year. I have been thinking about getting an account for a while now. Saw the special and decided to sign up. No, I can't since I was a customer on the past.
Yea, F them for not giving you the new customer 90% off promotion! Greedy bastards. (They have this to get new customers, you have already come and gone and most likely won't stick around to the point of profitability.)
Don't bother with them if you want anything more then a personal site. Their slowness and downtime will eat any commercial site alive. I'm a long time member but I can't use them for more then my blog and photos (I have lots and lots - more then 10 gigs and that would fill up most vps's) because when it comes to sites for other people you'll just loose customers.
I'm editing to add that I'm looking for a way to move my gallery (10+ gigs of photos) over to slicehost with a mounted "S3 volume" I'm not sure of the performance hits, but I'm willing to bet I'll get a faster site out of it.
With what they charge I don't see how you could even assume it's rock solid hosting. I have an account I use for backups and have no complaints. They are asking for a 10 spot in exchange for a year of hosting and a free domain name. Put it in perspective, that's less than the cost of a pizza.
probably not, they do that 777 deal all the time, so a lot of people are already signed up under that. i.e. when I signed up for dreamhost about 4 years ago, I used that same deal.
I still stick around with them, even though I hate the service, but that is mostly because I told about the deal to a few people when I signed up, so I make more money from referrals than I pay for hosting.
Is there any reason you couldn't just sign up for another account? Different credit card? Not the same as getting another year for $10, but you'd have unlimited bandwidth and disk for a year for ... $10.
It's surprising to see that coupon right on their homepage. Companies tend to be semi-open on great discounts. (meaning, they usually don't get out of their way that much to tell you you can save money)
However, as far as I'm concerned, that works: after looking at the features (pretty much everything seems to be available, unlimited), I'm considering it.
I constantly had times where server load was going through the roof, bringing my site to a crawl or unavailable for hours. Support was responsive, but the problems never went away. Use it for a personal site or maybe a test project, but nothing more.
As far as massively overloaded shared hosts go, they're not bad. Support for almost everything you could ever want, reasonably decent customer-support (as long as you don't mind their rather foot-in-mouth snarky approach - which I honestly don't mind, but does seem to drive some people crazy).
The two downsides are that a) as mentioned, they massively oversell their capacity; depending on what server you get, you may or may not have issues with downtime, bandwidth or processor usage; and b) if you have intermittent problems, they're generally pleasant but unhelpful - sort of the "nobody else is having problems so it must be something you're doing" approach.
I keep an account around for things where I'm really not worried about uptime or reliability - but I wouldn't trust them with anything business-critical.
I've been using them since '99, and all in all I'm happy with them. They've had some growing pains now and then, and since they're so big you'll get affected now and then when someone decides to DDoS one of their customers..
They support tons of tech, their control panel is quite useful, and just about everything is included in the base price.
They've also got those "virtual private machines", which means dedicated CPU and memory but they still take care of the boring admin stuff - but you don't get root access. Costs extra, of course.
I have a small blog hosted with Dreamhost and I am very happy with the service. The whole company seems particularly creative and very responsive to any question or need I have. Tech support in particular goes beyond simply responding to a problem and has taken the time to teach me how to fix issues myself the next time. It's a great company to associate one's site with, I think.
I've been with Dreamhost for a couple of years. I have a lot of sites with them. It's fine. It's very trendy to bash them.
I have had a private server with them for the last year, and recently added a 2nd one for a higher priority app I'm working on, as I don't want any of my other sites to crash it. The private servers are cool. I can crank up my server size using an API (or from their main panel) from the low of 150MB of memory for $15/month up to 4000MB of memory for $400/month. I enjoy this sort of flexibility.
Last night, I just upgraded from Apache to lighttpd, which unloads your processor still more. (They just rolled out lighttpd as an option yesterday)
I've been down a bit, usually for less than 6 hours at a time, and some of this was due to things I caused, like moving a https id from one private server to another.
I have been a DreamHost customer for 6 years. DreamHost is great for hosting a simple, largely static site. I tried to host a Rails app on DreamHost a few years ago and my site would often have HTTP 500 errors due to DreamHost killing my processes. They've probably improved their Rails support since then, but I wouldn't expect too much. But for something simple, they are cheap and fast. Their web panel makes it easy to create MySQL databases, mail accounts, shell accounts, sub-domains, and so forth. I also host my personal IMAP mailbox with them. It has always been reliable and I've had very little downtime.
If I were writing a mission critical, performance sensitive web app there is no way I'd host it on DreamHost. But for my basic personal site and email DreamHost works well.
I had a client who had "released" a founding CEO, who was the primary contact for their hosting. Although he wasn't malicious, both sides dropped the ball when it came to transferring ownership of the accounts.
Almost a year later, they come back after the holidays to find that their public-facing FTP account, hosted at Dreamhost, had been suspended. No big deal, except it was suspended before the holidays, everyone was out of the office, and when they came back, we paid to renew only to find out afterward that Dreamhost irretrievably deletes all of your data after 14 days.
Do you think that Dreamhost should be expected to hold data longer because there's a chance that some parties might have poor termination procedures and long stretches where they don't check their site or their emails?
Most of the other hosts that I've dealt with delete data from terminated accounts immediately.
Actually, I do. Not indefinitely, but 30 days would be a little more reasonable. (And I do recognize that most of the fault was on the client's end.)
Here's the thing: even at the ISP level, drive space is cheap. If they don't want to deal with drives themselves, there's always S3. Or nightly backups with an intelligent retrieval system.
And I'm not altogether ignorant about the ISP side: I worked for a small local ISP (http://spiral.com/), and they have some pretty long-term data retention that doesn't cost them anything and has occasionally made a customer really happy.
No, and I'm not about to go digging around to find one, because:
1, I have better things to do and I've already said my piece and spent enough time on this;
2, I don't think it's sensible to make business decisions based on whether or not your competitors do a particular thing. By that metric, Amazon doesn't need to provide awesome customer service because their competitors don't either. (See also Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries.)
So, awesome customer service is the goal. And awesome is defined as not 14 days, but 30 days. Wouldn't it be even more awesome at 90 or 365 or 1000? These organizations have to draw the line somewhere. You've drawn yours quite forcefully at 30. It's interesting that you expect so much more than any company (that we can think of) delivers, and insist that you won't deal with Dreamhost until they hit this metric. I'd love to know who you host with, or if you don't, then who you might eventually find that "fits the bill" for you.
"If Django is crucial to your site, you may wish to consider another host since Dreamhost does not officially support Django. In the past, some users have reported reliablity problems; however, others have had no problems."
"What's not allowed in 'Unlimited'?
Basically, sites whose essential purpose is to use disk or bandwidth.
When making a website, you should be thinking about "How can I make an interesting site for my visitors while minimizing my server storage, bandwidth, file system, memory, and cpu impact as much as possible?"
The result will be a better experience for your visitors, your web host, and yourself!
Here are some specific examples of things not allowed:
- Copyrighted content you are not the copyright holder of.
You arent going to be live 24/7, in the 4 years or so ive been with them I have been down 3 times for more than a day, and a few sporadic is it down / is it up moments.
It isnt going to be the fastest connection in the world, mine is reasonably fast, but it has slow moments.
people hosting business critical applications are just asking for trouble.
but past that, you have a lot of preinstalled software, svn takes a minute to set up, ssh access which you can install most things you want on and a silly amount of bandwidth / space. its pretty perfect for a first host, to put a blog up and share images folder etc.
Part of their bad reputation is from how transparent they are, they are honest about when they go down and what the fault is, their sense of humour about everything grates some people, but I appreciate not being given a canned coorporate response