Dreamhost sucks?

[AnthroAndStargate]

I am pricing for domain hosting and I found Dreamhost via ATOT. Well I did some deeper searching on ATOT and it found some links to the BBB report for Dreamhost (a B) and some very disgruntled customers.

The prices for Dreamhost seem really good and the fact that they use green energy credits to offset their carbon emissions is also a plus.

Does anyone use it? Is it really that bad? I read the mail servers never work and are blocked by other mail servers often?

 

[RandomFool]

I used Dreamhost for a year and never had a problem with them. My biggest complaint is that the upload/download was a little slow, but you get what you pay for. I only left because I was too cheap to pay the 120 bucks they wanted to renew. I got in on the 10 dollars for a year deal they used to have. I do know that right after I left they had some big data breach but I don't know the details of it. As far as the mail servers go I never had an issues with them.

 

[Anubis]

i had it free for 2 years, didnt feel likepaying for it, wasent the fastest, but for what i used it for it was fine

 

[AnthroAndStargate]

Do you guys have any recommendations? Where did you move to? MediaTemples gridservice perhaps? I just read some good things about it. Any others?

 

[funkymatt]

almost got a job doing tech support for them. the environment is very laid back, seemed like a decent company to work for. i took the job at western digital though.

 

[RandomFool]

Never heard of MediaTemple. I'm with HostPC right now, who are pretty good. I don't like the control panel DirectAdmin too much because it doesn't use port 80 meaning it's blocked at a lot places(work). I've heard a lot of good things about HostGator but I don't use my hosting enough to justify the price.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Dreamhost is just catering to the masses, and oversells a lot. If you plan to use it for anything important, don't try to save money by going with dreamhost.

 

[AnthroAndStargate]

Originally posted by: AgaBoogaBoo
Dreamhost is just catering to the masses, and oversells a lot. If you plan to use it for anything important, don't try to save money by going with dreamhost.

Any suggestions on a better host?

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: AnthroAndStargate

Originally posted by: AgaBoogaBoo
Dreamhost is just catering to the masses, and oversells a lot. If you plan to use it for anything important, don't try to save money by going with dreamhost.

Any suggestions on a better host?

What do you need hosting for? Once I know your needs, I can probably point you to someone that will work well for you.

 

[AnthroAndStargate]

Originally posted by: AgaBoogaBoo

Originally posted by: AnthroAndStargate

Originally posted by: AgaBoogaBoo
Dreamhost is just catering to the masses, and oversells a lot. If you plan to use it for anything important, don't try to save money by going with dreamhost.

Any suggestions on a better host?

What do you need hosting for? Once I know your needs, I can probably point you to someone that will work well for you.

I got drafted to work on this project that is basically going to be a CMS around science and politics issues (I hate to use the word blog because it will be more of a forum, etc.) but anyways of course it may pan out and be a heavy traffic site or it may flounder.

I am not paying for this project at the budget is 2K for whatever needs to be spent. Of course I would like to get some advertising for it and what not so I don't want to blow all of the 2K on hosting but I have a large budget - would prefer to get a year or two of hosting up front (unless you wouldn't recommend this).

As for needs - subdomains, mail accounts (exchange would be a big plus but not necessary at ALL), large storage and bandwidth - like I said it will most likely be running CMS software so I assume SQL and the like is necessary.

Thanks so much for the help you have given!

Dreamhost looked REALLY appealing but then I read on Google that a lot of people say it has really bad downtime - especially for high traffic sites. Getting a host that purchases wind/solar/nuclear energy would be a plus in terms of the site- something like ThinkHost although ThinkHost is a little too politically charged/boisterous for my tastes.

 

[pstylesss]

Do not pay for hosting server in advance, especially 2 years. hostgator.com is very good, imo. I'm with them now and have been with them off and on. To find out who you want to go with, contact tech support and see how quickly they respond... always a good indicator of a good host.

 

[Aluvus]

I have a site hosted with DreamHost; I got in on the big-discount coupon as well. Uptime is passable for my needs but by no means good. Mail servers seem to have pretty frequent issues, but I don't run any mail through them so I can't say with authority. If you'd like some idea of what kind of service issues are typical, read through some entries on the status blog. FWIW the auto-installers they have for MediaWiki, Joomla, and others are handy (but not a huge deal).

As for how good they are overall, let me put it to you this way: For what I'm paying right now, it's a decent deal. But I will not be renewing with them at full price.

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: AnthroAndStargate

Originally posted by: AgaBoogaBoo

Originally posted by: AnthroAndStargate

Originally posted by: AgaBoogaBoo
Dreamhost is just catering to the masses, and oversells a lot. If you plan to use it for anything important, don't try to save money by going with dreamhost.

Any suggestions on a better host?

What do you need hosting for? Once I know your needs, I can probably point you to someone that will work well for you.

I got drafted to work on this project that is basically going to be a CMS around science and politics issues (I hate to use the word blog because it will be more of a forum, etc.) but anyways of course it may pan out and be a heavy traffic site or it may flounder.

I am not paying for this project at the budget is 2K for whatever needs to be spent. Of course I would like to get some advertising for it and what not so I don't want to blow all of the 2K on hosting but I have a large budget - would prefer to get a year or two of hosting up front (unless you wouldn't recommend this).

As for needs - subdomains, mail accounts (exchange would be a big plus but not necessary at ALL), large storage and bandwidth - like I said it will most likely be running CMS software so I assume SQL and the like is necessary.

Thanks so much for the help you have given!

Dreamhost looked REALLY appealing but then I read on Google that a lot of people say it has really bad downtime - especially for high traffic sites. Getting a host that purchases wind/solar/nuclear energy would be a plus in terms of the site- something like ThinkHost although ThinkHost is a little too politically charged/boisterous for my tastes.

My two cents:

Have you decided on a CMS script? If you have, which one?

Just to clarify, are you looking for Linux (PHP/MySQL) or Windows (ASP/.Net/Coldfusion) web hosting?

It depends on who you ask but there are better choices for web hosting. If you're only hosting a personal website, hobby or blog DreamHost will probably work.

Generally I do not recommend prepaying for web hosting more than 3 months at a time. Of the 50+ web hosting accounts (shared/reseller/VPS/dedicated) that I have had, I've only prepaid on 4 of them. For example I paid for BR03 upfront for 1 year and received 2 years for free. A resellers account with WHM/cPanel/Fantastico offering 2GB/40GB for $98 for 3 years ... I'm glad I scored that.

You may want to consider iMountain.com then you should read this :shocked:

 

[ppdes]

I've had DreamHost for a few years. Most hosts don't allow adult content or charge a lot more for transfer if they do, so I don't have much choice. But there are other reasons I stick with them as well. A lot of other hosts don't give you shell access, for example. Some even make you go through a really crappy web interface just to transfer files. DreamHost is the complete opposite: I've heard of people compiling their own versions of PHP, I have a cron job that runs an rsync command to do an offsite backup of the file system and DB every night, they also have this neat hidden directory you can cd into with snapshots of your file system at previous dates.

Anyway, I'm quite happy. There's a small amount of down time every once in a while, the email servers got on a spam list for a week, and other minor problems, but it is not like they charge a lot either. They have promo codes to get a dirt cheap first year. I'd say go ahead and try it. It's easy enough to transfer afterwards if it doesn't meet your needs.

 

[AnthroAndStargate]

Thanks for all the advice/help!

 

[dartworth]

Take a look at http://www.hostgator.com/

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I think the shell access alone was the winner for me. Are they great? They're decent. Uptime has been good for me as I haven't had downtime issues yet. I think with any large host you will be able to find disgruntled customers. That's like saying there are people dealing with failed 7200.10s. Well no sh!t? So many of those drives are being sold and you can't always expect perfect reliability.

Do they oversell? Probably but large hosts can afford to oversell. They're not the cheapest host that's for sure and they can easily accommodate for a few heavy bandwidth users given their large customer base.

 

[AnthroAndStargate]

Originally posted by: DLeRium
I think the shell access alone was the winner for me. Are they great? They're decent. Uptime has been good for me as I haven't had downtime issues yet. I think with any large host you will be able to find disgruntled customers. That's like saying there are people dealing with failed 7200.10s. Well no sh!t? So many of those drives are being sold and you can't always expect perfect reliability.

Do they oversell? Probably but large hosts can afford to oversell. They're not the cheapest host that's for sure and they can easily accommodate for a few heavy bandwidth users given their large customer base.

It doesn't seem like they have a problem with a simple server reboot though - these POed customers were saying that the servers go down for 2-3 hours like every week. One guy said that he was having 20 hours of downtime every week. This isn't happening for you?

Also what are the benefits of having shell unix acc?

 

[RandomFool]

Originally posted by: AnthroAndStargate
It doesn't seem like they have a problem with a simple server reboot though - these POed customers were saying that the servers go down for 2-3 hours like every week. One guy said that he was having 20 hours of downtime every week. This isn't happening for you?

Also what are the benefits of having shell unix acc?

I never had any of those issues. I can't remember my site ever being down when I wanted to use it. Granted it's not exactly a heavily used site but I do access through-out the day.

 

[George P Burdell]

My reasons for staying with Dreamhost:
* In two years, I have only paid then $20 total
* My personal website is not mission critical
* SSH access

I wouldn't use them for business websites. For personal websites, they do fine.

 

[ppdes]

Maybe an hour a month down time that I notice. Different people are on different servers. It's quite possible the complainers ended up on an overcrowded one or one where another user was causing problems somehow and gave up before it was dealt with. I slowed a friend's private server with a different host down to a crawl once by deploying some code that did uncached server side image resizes and compositions on the fly, for example.

If you have to ask what shell access is useful for, then it won't be useful for you. Personally I can't even imagine running a website without find, grep, cron, rsync, perl, chmod, curl, scp, editing .htaccess files by hand, etc.. I suppose the web control panel most accounts have nowadays will have some sort of crappy GUI way to handle the essentials for people who don't know any better.