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This is only my personal experience, bu I am embarrassed to report that I have been in DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimporta

This is only my personal experience, bu I am embarrassed to report that I have been in DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects. I have been consistently disappointed with the level of their engineering and systems. Their systems are unreliable, their custom build ticketing system is atrocious. I would take any technical advice from them with a handful of salt.

tomschlick 10y ago
You'd be better off with a $5/mo digital ocean VM.
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  Not at all. A VM is quite different to a shared host. There is more work and maintenance involved. For smaller projects its not worth it.
arkitaip 10y ago
Take a look at Webfaction. It's dev friendly hosting, great support, has lots of 1-click installer if you need them.
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  +1 for webfaction. Their stuff just works and the staff is super helpful.
charliepark 10y ago
As a counterpoint (and this is only my personal experience), but I'm happy to report that I've been a DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects. I've been really happy with everything. Not sure how our usage of their service differs (probably lots!), but I would hate for people to dismiss DreamHost without hearing about a positive experience with them.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  Also been a customer for over 10 years. Mostly quite happy. What bugs me about them most right now is their new control panel design. The log out link is at the bottom left, so it gets pushed off the screen when you expand the menus. I have sent at least 3 tickets to them over the course of about 4 months telling them that they need to move the log out link to the top of the page, somewhere in the copious amounts of empty space they have up there. They have responded every time saying they would look into it, pass it along, etc. But nothing's changed. I could fix it myself in 30 seconds by copying and pasting the code in the template. And I can't help but wonder, if they are so incompetent as to not realize that, when the log out link gets pushed off the page, their design is broken, what else are they incompetent with? Security? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how broken it is--do their middle managers or higher-ups not recognize the problem? If not, what other problems do they not recognize? And if my messages to them are not getting through to those who could fix them, that's a problem in their support system. So I would keep an eye on them. I hope they are not beginning to decline.
- joshstrange 10y ago
  I have been a customer for about 9 years now and I similarly host small, unimportant, and friend's projects (The "hey you know websites, I want a website" and I setup wordpress and forget about it). I am generally happy with them, their control panel is kind of shit but they are worth every penny to me. I don't have to think about them except every 2 years when they bill me. I have somewhere around 20 websites for other people on there and every time it get's close to the renewal date I consider throwing it all on DO/AWS but honestly the costs would be close and support/setup would take a lot more of my time so ~$200 is an easy sell for 2 years of peace. I started with them in high school when I was just getting started and I don't use it for my own real projects anymore but it's perfect for friends/family and the occasional wordpress I need to throw up. One last thing, I also used bluehost for a while but I found dreamhost to have a better interface (even though they are both pretty bad)
pyvpx 10y ago
their shared hosting product is very, very different from their DreamCompute offering. completely different everything, aside from the datacenter space.
- nowprovision 10y ago
  Same company same standards?
moron4hire 10y ago
Agreed, and they frequently make changes without warning, then send out an email, "sorry if you didn't receive notification this was happening". They make it sound like it's my fault I didn't hear them, when I'm pretty sure they just never said anything to begin with. Azure has been more reliable, faster, more convenient, and cheaper.
jest3r1 10y ago
No need to be embarrassed. I've been with them for about the same amount of time. A few domains registered, personal email, a few website projects, a couple cron jobs, and an OwnCloud install ... Generally they deliver. Not spectacular, but much better than any of the other shared hosts. The reason why I haven't moved off them completely is because for smaller web projects it's easier to have everything in one place, ready to go and managed, without dealing with deploying and maintaining the stack (which can be overkill for hobby stuff). All of the other shared hosts went to shit about 5 years ago. Dreamhost may eventually get there as well, but for the time being they are still decent, and get the job done.
- arghimonmobile 10y ago
  > All of the other shared hosts went to shit about 5 years ago. I'm not sure what your requirements are, but I've been very happy with nearlyfreespeech for a few years now. I just host a simple static site so YMMV.
  - jest3r1 10y ago
    My requirements are all of the shared hosts that got acquired by Endurance International Group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group Some say EIG killed shared hosting.
    - doublerebel 10y ago
      I switched to A Small Orange years ago when EIG started swallowing up the world. ASO is fantastic and now I use them with all my clients and startups too. Side note: an EIG company has given me free hosting for years because their botched takeover of my previous favorite caused them to stop billing me. I've also had really poor experiences with Dreamhost.
      - jest3r1 10y ago
        I had some clients on a Small Orange. They used to be great. EIG took over a Small Orange in 2010, but thankfully left them autonomous for while. Unfortunately in 2014 Douglas Hannah (ASO founder) left and since then things have gone downhill. This happened around the same time EIG took over HostGator. HostGator founder Brent Oxley and (no coincidence) friend Douglas Hannah have gone on to start a new venture with their big time profits from selling out to EIG. 2014 and 2015 were riddled with major outages at both A Small Orange and HostGator. I'm sure you remember the 4-day Small Orange VPS outage of Christmas 2015 ?! That was fun. I got my last client off them after that and never looked back. Just now I looked at their status page and looks like they never really recovered: https://status.asmallorange.com/ https://status.asmallorange.com/
nowprovision 10y ago
Yeah over the years they have had some major WTFs. Most recently one of their email clusters supporting thousands of customers went out for 9 days. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1588201 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1588201 I'd take the article with a pinch of salt, they admit they haven't got anywhere near capacity yet, and it doesn't seem like they'd done any real load testing before "final layout". They could easily go the way of most low end VPS providers, day one benchmarks look great and then a few months later when the node fills out and people start using it performances sinks with no lower bound to be seen anywhere.
- Washuu 10y ago
  Add this one, their US-East-1 cloud zone has been down for 24 hours now. My instances are in limbo where no option to just move them to another zone. http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2016/10/11/dreamcompute-us-east-1-cluster-service-disruption/ http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2016/10/11/dreamcompute-us-ea...
zhte415 10y ago
> I am embarrassed to report that I have been in DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects No need to be embarrassed. I used DH for many many years, starting probably about 13-14 years ago. Since moved to Linode and DO in order to fully control a stack even for small personal things, however fond memories are having a managed environment for a very low price, wildcard emails, bundled domain, and mostly, sticking to their promise which got me to sign-up in the first place: any new pricing plan will be offered to existing customers at the same rate as new customers, which 10-15 years ago was almost unheard of.
- randoramax 10y ago
  Check out DreamHost Cloud if you need full control of the stack (based on OpenStack, you get more than DO and Linode at a better price)

tomschlick 10y ago

You'd be better off with a $5/mo digital ocean VM.

asimuvPR 10y ago
Not at all. A VM is quite different to a shared host. There is more work and maintenance involved. For smaller projects its not worth it.

arkitaip 10y ago

Take a look at Webfaction. It's dev friendly hosting, great support, has lots of 1-click installer if you need them.

asimuvPR 10y ago
+1 for webfaction. Their stuff just works and the staff is super helpful.

charliepark 10y ago

As a counterpoint (and this is only my personal experience), but I'm happy to report that I've been a DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects. I've been really happy with everything. Not sure how our usage of their service differs (probably lots!), but I would hate for people to dismiss DreamHost without hearing about a positive experience with them.

alphapapa 10y ago
Also been a customer for over 10 years. Mostly quite happy. What bugs me about them most right now is their new control panel design. The log out link is at the bottom left, so it gets pushed off the screen when you expand the menus. I have sent at least 3 tickets to them over the course of about 4 months telling them that they need to move the log out link to the top of the page, somewhere in the copious amounts of empty space they have up there. They have responded every time saying they would look into it, pass it along, etc. But nothing's changed. I could fix it myself in 30 seconds by copying and pasting the code in the template. And I can't help but wonder, if they are so incompetent as to not realize that, when the log out link gets pushed off the page, their design is broken, what else are they incompetent with? Security? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how broken it is--do their middle managers or higher-ups not recognize the problem? If not, what other problems do they not recognize? And if my messages to them are not getting through to those who could fix them, that's a problem in their support system. So I would keep an eye on them. I hope they are not beginning to decline.
joshstrange 10y ago
I have been a customer for about 9 years now and I similarly host small, unimportant, and friend's projects (The "hey you know websites, I want a website" and I setup wordpress and forget about it). I am generally happy with them, their control panel is kind of shit but they are worth every penny to me. I don't have to think about them except every 2 years when they bill me. I have somewhere around 20 websites for other people on there and every time it get's close to the renewal date I consider throwing it all on DO/AWS but honestly the costs would be close and support/setup would take a lot more of my time so ~$200 is an easy sell for 2 years of peace. I started with them in high school when I was just getting started and I don't use it for my own real projects anymore but it's perfect for friends/family and the occasional wordpress I need to throw up. One last thing, I also used bluehost for a while but I found dreamhost to have a better interface (even though they are both pretty bad)

pyvpx 10y ago

their shared hosting product is very, very different from their DreamCompute offering. completely different everything, aside from the datacenter space.

nowprovision 10y ago
Same company same standards?

moron4hire 10y ago

Agreed, and they frequently make changes without warning, then send out an email, "sorry if you didn't receive notification this was happening". They make it sound like it's my fault I didn't hear them, when I'm pretty sure they just never said anything to begin with. Azure has been more reliable, faster, more convenient, and cheaper.

jest3r1 10y ago

No need to be embarrassed. I've been with them for about the same amount of time. A few domains registered, personal email, a few website projects, a couple cron jobs, and an OwnCloud install ... Generally they deliver. Not spectacular, but much better than any of the other shared hosts. The reason why I haven't moved off them completely is because for smaller web projects it's easier to have everything in one place, ready to go and managed, without dealing with deploying and maintaining the stack (which can be overkill for hobby stuff). All of the other shared hosts went to shit about 5 years ago. Dreamhost may eventually get there as well, but for the time being they are still decent, and get the job done.

arghimonmobile 10y ago
> All of the other shared hosts went to shit about 5 years ago. I'm not sure what your requirements are, but I've been very happy with nearlyfreespeech for a few years now. I just host a simple static site so YMMV.
- jest3r1 10y ago
  My requirements are all of the shared hosts that got acquired by Endurance International Group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group Some say EIG killed shared hosting.
  - doublerebel 10y ago
    I switched to A Small Orange years ago when EIG started swallowing up the world. ASO is fantastic and now I use them with all my clients and startups too. Side note: an EIG company has given me free hosting for years because their botched takeover of my previous favorite caused them to stop billing me. I've also had really poor experiences with Dreamhost.
    - jest3r1 10y ago
      I had some clients on a Small Orange. They used to be great. EIG took over a Small Orange in 2010, but thankfully left them autonomous for while. Unfortunately in 2014 Douglas Hannah (ASO founder) left and since then things have gone downhill. This happened around the same time EIG took over HostGator. HostGator founder Brent Oxley and (no coincidence) friend Douglas Hannah have gone on to start a new venture with their big time profits from selling out to EIG. 2014 and 2015 were riddled with major outages at both A Small Orange and HostGator. I'm sure you remember the 4-day Small Orange VPS outage of Christmas 2015 ?! That was fun. I got my last client off them after that and never looked back. Just now I looked at their status page and looks like they never really recovered: https://status.asmallorange.com/ https://status.asmallorange.com/

nowprovision 10y ago

Yeah over the years they have had some major WTFs. Most recently one of their email clusters supporting thousands of customers went out for 9 days. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1588201 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1588201 I'd take the article with a pinch of salt, they admit they haven't got anywhere near capacity yet, and it doesn't seem like they'd done any real load testing before "final layout". They could easily go the way of most low end VPS providers, day one benchmarks look great and then a few months later when the node fills out and people start using it performances sinks with no lower bound to be seen anywhere.

Washuu 10y ago
Add this one, their US-East-1 cloud zone has been down for 24 hours now. My instances are in limbo where no option to just move them to another zone. http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2016/10/11/dreamcompute-us-east-1-cluster-service-disruption/ http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2016/10/11/dreamcompute-us-ea...

zhte415 10y ago

> I am embarrassed to report that I have been in DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects No need to be embarrassed. I used DH for many many years, starting probably about 13-14 years ago. Since moved to Linode and DO in order to fully control a stack even for small personal things, however fond memories are having a managed environment for a very low price, wildcard emails, bundled domain, and mostly, sticking to their promise which got me to sign-up in the first place: any new pricing plan will be offered to existing customers at the same rate as new customers, which 10-15 years ago was almost unheard of.

randoramax 10y ago
Check out DreamHost Cloud if you need full control of the stack (based on OpenStack, you get more than DO and Linode at a better price)