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I, like most of us, did a stint on dreamhost back in the day. Shared host, 3 dollars a month, who wouldn't want that. Left when I realized that my email domai

I, like most of us, did a stint on dreamhost back in the day. Shared host, 3 dollars a month, who wouldn't want that. Left when I realized that my email domain couldn't consistently send and receive mail. It would sporadically die for a few hours then be up a week, then down for a few hours, etc. Hoped they would get their act together one day. Seems not.

Grazester 4y ago
I never took Dreamhost seriously and have avoided them as a result.
elevation 4y ago
I've been a dreamhost email and hosting customer for 18 years. My only downtime from them was a 3-day outtage after an earthquake disrupted power to their datacenter near LAX. No downtime since. I did have a brief outbound email deliverability issue with yahoo in 2010 and again with a small ISP in Wisconsin in 2017. Both resolved within a few days of contacting support.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Or maybe you just haven’t noticed missing incoming emails?
  - apecat 4y ago
    In my experience, Dreamhost's e-mail has been the part of the service that always worked. I'm under the impression that the architecture of their e-mail service has been some sort of HA clustered setup for ages, and I think one of their unusually outspoken blog post in the 00s said outright that their customers are less sensitive to web than e-mail outages. I've had an account with Dreamhost since June 2007. Their web uptime wasn't great back in the day. I seem to remember that they made a bad investment in some sort of very expensive NAS or SAN architecture from NetApp that caused a lot of downtime because the filers just regularly dropped clients. However, with the dawn of cheap SSD, I think they moved back to local, per-server disks in the early 2010s. I still have my Dreamhost account. They don't use cPanel, which was appealing to a younger me, for aesthetic reasons, and they also gave away sub account privileges you had to pay extra for as reseller hosting at other places. My DH account has been a Swiss army knife of sorts for doing small web and hosting related things. This was especially useful back in the days before you could just use free Cloudflare DNS for random things. These days, I use my own M365 business tenant for e-mail, and all my web customers are on servers in Europe, largely on hosting accounts based on cPanel, which I hated before. Now I like the ease with which I can ask a new provider to migrate all my cPanel accounts. It keeps the web hosting business extremely competitive. Dreamhost also uses absurdly old hardware, my account is on an 8-core AMD Opteron 4122 CPU. Performance isn't particularly good. They also use Debian, so they don't rely on new features that CloudLinux and LiteSpeed bring to the table for shared hosting, to limit resource congestion/noisy neighbors. My plan is actually to get off Dreamhost during my upcoming summer vacation.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I'm glad you have had a good experience with them. For me, in 2006, my email services was the most important thing I had. I ran a family email server that was used by a small group of us. Any outages were hard to accept. We had a lot. It may have been the host I got put onto, the ip address of the host may have had a shared-account-bad-actor causing an RBL, or any number of reasons. Just goes to show you that one experience is not all. Thanks!
rpdillon 4y ago
Been a customer since 2004. Shared hosting for most of that time, VPS since 2018 or so. I'm thrilled with their service, and feel like they've always had their act together. I only use them to self-host personal stuff like FreshRSS, pastebins, and fossil, though; nothing professional or high-scale.
BizarroLand 4y ago
Whoops! I guess there was an error in our advertising! It was supposed to be nine 5's uptime, not five 9's.
retox 4y ago
Email problems are why I ditched DH. I was waiting for some very important visa and job offer emails and though I could send, I wasn't receiving anything and missed some deadlines that ended up losing me a job. Their support said that email was essentially a 'bonus' and there was to be no expectation of it's reliability. This was circa 2015.

Grazester 4y ago

I never took Dreamhost seriously and have avoided them as a result.

elevation 4y ago

I've been a dreamhost email and hosting customer for 18 years. My only downtime from them was a 3-day outtage after an earthquake disrupted power to their datacenter near LAX. No downtime since. I did have a brief outbound email deliverability issue with yahoo in 2010 and again with a small ISP in Wisconsin in 2017. Both resolved within a few days of contacting support.

eurasiantiger 4y ago
Or maybe you just haven’t noticed missing incoming emails?
- apecat 4y ago
  In my experience, Dreamhost's e-mail has been the part of the service that always worked. I'm under the impression that the architecture of their e-mail service has been some sort of HA clustered setup for ages, and I think one of their unusually outspoken blog post in the 00s said outright that their customers are less sensitive to web than e-mail outages. I've had an account with Dreamhost since June 2007. Their web uptime wasn't great back in the day. I seem to remember that they made a bad investment in some sort of very expensive NAS or SAN architecture from NetApp that caused a lot of downtime because the filers just regularly dropped clients. However, with the dawn of cheap SSD, I think they moved back to local, per-server disks in the early 2010s. I still have my Dreamhost account. They don't use cPanel, which was appealing to a younger me, for aesthetic reasons, and they also gave away sub account privileges you had to pay extra for as reseller hosting at other places. My DH account has been a Swiss army knife of sorts for doing small web and hosting related things. This was especially useful back in the days before you could just use free Cloudflare DNS for random things. These days, I use my own M365 business tenant for e-mail, and all my web customers are on servers in Europe, largely on hosting accounts based on cPanel, which I hated before. Now I like the ease with which I can ask a new provider to migrate all my cPanel accounts. It keeps the web hosting business extremely competitive. Dreamhost also uses absurdly old hardware, my account is on an 8-core AMD Opteron 4122 CPU. Performance isn't particularly good. They also use Debian, so they don't rely on new features that CloudLinux and LiteSpeed bring to the table for shared hosting, to limit resource congestion/noisy neighbors. My plan is actually to get off Dreamhost during my upcoming summer vacation.
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
I'm glad you have had a good experience with them. For me, in 2006, my email services was the most important thing I had. I ran a family email server that was used by a small group of us. Any outages were hard to accept. We had a lot. It may have been the host I got put onto, the ip address of the host may have had a shared-account-bad-actor causing an RBL, or any number of reasons. Just goes to show you that one experience is not all. Thanks!

rpdillon 4y ago

Been a customer since 2004. Shared hosting for most of that time, VPS since 2018 or so. I'm thrilled with their service, and feel like they've always had their act together. I only use them to self-host personal stuff like FreshRSS, pastebins, and fossil, though; nothing professional or high-scale.

BizarroLand 4y ago

Whoops! I guess there was an error in our advertising! It was supposed to be nine 5's uptime, not five 9's.

retox 4y ago

Email problems are why I ditched DH. I was waiting for some very important visa and job offer emails and though I could send, I wasn't receiving anything and missed some deadlines that ended up losing me a job. Their support said that email was essentially a 'bonus' and there was to be no expectation of it's reliability. This was circa 2015.