Web Host Thoughts
Published November 29th, 2007 in Blog Updates
I’ve been with DreamHost for a little over a year and a half, and my opinion of them has swayed back and forth quite a bit during that time. In the summer of 2006, DH (and DH’s customers) went through hell. I kept pretty cool about the whole issue, despite that there were many problems that would never have been issues if they had setup their network properly in the first place.
I kept thinking that even good sites go down now and then (of course, with DH it really was both now and then!). The price was good and the customer service was generally decent. But even after that incident, DH had issues again and again. My particular server went down every day for 15-45 minutes for several days in a row. I pointed out the issue every time and the most detailed response was “it looks like /tmp filled up again.” Don’t you people monitor this kind of thing?
Service has continued to be less than dreamy. In the past six weeks, only two have had no downtime and all have had terrible response times, according to both of the website monitoring services that I use. Most weeks have around an hour of downtime, though some have quite a bit more. Tech support is very capable of saying, “Sorry about that; we have the issue fixed now and your site should be back up any minute,” but not so fast to do anything that would prevent repeat problems. The load stays at about 8 or above on my server, often making Vim useless and causing a great deal of frustration. Check out the wonderful graphs:
Anyway, I’ve come away with the opinion that DH is a value host that is best for personal webpages and file storage. If you want to do any real development, look elsewhere. Currently, I am looking at SliceHost and am fairly convinced that they will be the way to go in the future. They offer a VPS setup rather than standard shared hosting, so there is quite a bit more work involved as I would be adopting the basic duties of a server admin, but it’s also far faster and more reliable.
It’s still a few months before I need to change hosts, but I’ll be doing more exploring before then. I’ve even made a wishlist for what I would want if I were to write my own blogging software (since I’ve been less and less pleased with WordPress lately), in case I could complete that task in time for the domain transfer. I think I’ll have enough time for that task, but I’ll post about it if I do.
I have been using Slicehost for about a year now without a single problem. The servers are not over crowded and the customer service rocks!
Thanks for the input, Robert. Your comments reflect what everyone else has been saying about their service, so I’m optimistic that they will be my choice in the near future.
I’d be remiss not to recommend you to take a look at Hard Hat Hosting.
I’ve seen a lot of praise for Hard Hat, but I previously thought that I wouldn’t use them because of my disk space needs. I see now that they have a promo code of “TRIPLE08″ that might make them a possibility. I’ll have to look a little more closely at how much resources I use/need.