On Dreamhost
When I bought my first domain name back in 2000, I hosted it with Dreamhost. Even back then, they were the cool kids on the block, albeit smaller. I eventually ditched them in search of greener pastures—I was a poor college kid and they charged a setup fee, their plans weren’t as good as they are now. I’ve used a few different hosts over the years, some good and some not so much. But a few years ago for their birthday, Dreamhost offered a hosting deal way too good to refuse, and I switched back.
Mostly I’ve been completely happy. Their plans are insane, and they allow you to host unlimited domains on an account (big plus for me). The thing is, lately I have been completely unhappy.
Perhaps you read about all the problems they experienced in July. Looking back, I’m lucky my sites were up for my demo installs for my talk at BlogHer. Anyway, what kills me about that explanation they posted, and while I understand power outages at their datacenter is something they maybe don’t have control over, is all of the comments praising their transparency. Are you kidding me? I mean, I’m glad they’re honest about everything, but it really doesn’t make up for all of the downtime and problems I experienced.
At the time I thought, okay, that sucked, but it will never happen again. However, it’s happening again. I experienced intermittent downtime in August. My site was down this past Friday. This morning I couldn’t connect to my database, which ruined my main page. I feel like I must be on bad machines or something, because sometimes I experience problems when other Dreamhost customers are not.
Winn and I talked about this a little today, and he said, “Well, I think the question is whether or not these are growing pains or if their service is just really going downhill.” I’m not sure which it is. I can’t have my site down all the time, but it’d be a shame to throw away years of great service and a great plan for some temporary and hopefully fixable problems.
(P.S. No need to pimp your host. If I move, I already know where I’m going.)
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