After continuous frustration with Dreamhost, I’ve moved to Slicehost. Dreamhost has been extremely slow about confirming the registration transfer, but I modified the DNS records to try to force the sites to be served from my new location. Above is a chart showing the response time at gordaen.com for a week; can you guess at which point the site started to be served from Slicehost?
Need further comparison? This blog is (currently) WordPress-based, which means bloated. On my “slice,” the content is served dynamically with ~40 queries faster than Dreamhost served the same page from cache. I started to write my own blogging system because WordPress was often unusable at Dreamhost; now I’m only continuing because the coding is fun. Performance is no longer an issue. I can finally preview a post quickly (~36 queries, .220 seconds)…
I started keeping a log of the output from uptime to watch load at the DH server. I just had it append to a file every hour with the output (preceded by the date command). In one week, the load ranged from just shy of three to 185.38! More than half of the entries are in the double digits.
For the Linux gurus:
@dh:~$ ll ../ | wc -l
733
