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My least horrible experiences have all been with DreamHost as well. Our company did reseller hosting for about 5 years and went through all of the acquisition

My least horrible experiences have all been with DreamHost as well. Our company did reseller hosting for about 5 years and went through all of the acquisition stuff Marco mentions. We had to exit SoftLayer because they were horrible, only to be brought right back. Hosting is a horrible business. To be good at it and have marketplace success you need to deliver over the top support; which is just unsustainable at scale.

jfb 13y ago
It seems like the kind of thing that well-intentioned people can get into without too terribly much capital, only to have things go totally non-linear on them. My own minimal needs have always been perfectly well met by Linode, so I recommend them if anybody asks me (which people rarely do.) I've heard goodish things about Dreamhost, as well.
CharlesW 13y ago
I'm not a fan of "me too"s, but I've been a DreamHost customer since 2001 and use them for smaller sites and may try VPS and/or dedicated with them in the future. I recall one rough patch with them in 2006 (http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an-ongoing-disaster/ http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an...), but I felt like they did a pretty good job of keeping customers informed and so I stuck with them.
- dave5104 13y ago
  I've been a DH VPS customer for... years now. Don't even remember how long since I upgraded from shared. (And I've been with DH since 2006.) Coming from the shared environment, having a VPS is infinitely nicer. We would have an issue every month or two on shared hosting, but now it's an issue every year or so on their VPS knocks on wood My general experience with DH is that uptime is fantastic... but when it rains, it pours for a day or so. But then right back to clear skies for months.
- secabeen 13y ago
  Dremahost VPS is a pretty interesting product, as you still get the unlimited disk and bandwidth of the shared product, but now on a VPS.
driverdan 13y ago
DH's shared hosting is bad, possibly horrible. Their shared servers go down frequently. Often they didn't even seem to know the server I'm on was down until I sent a support request. I keep my account for testing and sites I don't really care much about.
- wonderyak 13y ago
  Shared hosting is really bad in general. If you happen to be grouped up with people that are constantly hitting their resource limits and/or the box is oversold it can be even worse.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    1996 was my first shared hosting. 96-97 was OK, but I had a project for a client that got shut down after a few days. It was a small ecommerce project, and we got shut down for 'resource abuse' - CPU was spiking and network was going crazy. Had a week of back and forth emails and I think phone with their 'support. They were poking through my code, bitching that I was doing "select *" queries ("those are inefficient" they kept arguing). After a week we were reinstated - turns out there was someone else running spambot on another hosting account on the same server. But... we were "ecommerce" so obviously must have been the root cause of a spiked CPU. I vowed at that point to not use shared hosting again, and haven't since 1998. It's been nicer with cheap VPSs over the last few years - easier to get clients set up with their 'own' servers. I know that VPSs are shared as well, and I've seen issues where one VPS abused resources to the point where it affected mine, but that's been pretty rare (2x in the past 5 years I can think of), and it's always easier for people to track down, isolate and resolve. Also, it was one anecdote point, and was 15 years ago, and was just 'bad service' but life is too short to try to be putting projects as risk to save a few bucks. Projects/sites generally have enough troubles - dealing with shared hosting is just one more thing that can go wrong, imo.
    - wonderyak 13y ago
      Sounds like you've been using VPSs for a while. Do you have an opinion on the virtualization tech used for various hosts (xen, virtuozzo, etc).
slig 13y ago
I've been hosting small sites on WebFaction <https://www.webfaction.com/> https://www.webfaction.com/>. I never had problems of downtime and the support has been reasonably responsive the couple of times I needed.
- pjbrunet 13y ago
  You never had trouble but come back here in few years. WebFaction registered September 28, 2003. 10 years in business, not bad. But if you start recommending hosts there's going to be a list here 10 miles long.
damon_c 13y ago
I signed up with DreamHost a couple of years ago and they sent me my password in plaintext in the confirmation email. Am I wrong to have walked away immediately?

jfb 13y ago

It seems like the kind of thing that well-intentioned people can get into without too terribly much capital, only to have things go totally non-linear on them. My own minimal needs have always been perfectly well met by Linode, so I recommend them if anybody asks me (which people rarely do.) I've heard goodish things about Dreamhost, as well.

CharlesW 13y ago

I'm not a fan of "me too"s, but I've been a DreamHost customer since 2001 and use them for smaller sites and may try VPS and/or dedicated with them in the future. I recall one rough patch with them in 2006 (http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an-ongoing-disaster/ http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an...), but I felt like they did a pretty good job of keeping customers informed and so I stuck with them.

dave5104 13y ago
I've been a DH VPS customer for... years now. Don't even remember how long since I upgraded from shared. (And I've been with DH since 2006.) Coming from the shared environment, having a VPS is infinitely nicer. We would have an issue every month or two on shared hosting, but now it's an issue every year or so on their VPS knocks on wood My general experience with DH is that uptime is fantastic... but when it rains, it pours for a day or so. But then right back to clear skies for months.
secabeen 13y ago
Dremahost VPS is a pretty interesting product, as you still get the unlimited disk and bandwidth of the shared product, but now on a VPS.

driverdan 13y ago

DH's shared hosting is bad, possibly horrible. Their shared servers go down frequently. Often they didn't even seem to know the server I'm on was down until I sent a support request. I keep my account for testing and sites I don't really care much about.

wonderyak 13y ago
Shared hosting is really bad in general. If you happen to be grouped up with people that are constantly hitting their resource limits and/or the box is oversold it can be even worse.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  1996 was my first shared hosting. 96-97 was OK, but I had a project for a client that got shut down after a few days. It was a small ecommerce project, and we got shut down for 'resource abuse' - CPU was spiking and network was going crazy. Had a week of back and forth emails and I think phone with their 'support. They were poking through my code, bitching that I was doing "select *" queries ("those are inefficient" they kept arguing). After a week we were reinstated - turns out there was someone else running spambot on another hosting account on the same server. But... we were "ecommerce" so obviously must have been the root cause of a spiked CPU. I vowed at that point to not use shared hosting again, and haven't since 1998. It's been nicer with cheap VPSs over the last few years - easier to get clients set up with their 'own' servers. I know that VPSs are shared as well, and I've seen issues where one VPS abused resources to the point where it affected mine, but that's been pretty rare (2x in the past 5 years I can think of), and it's always easier for people to track down, isolate and resolve. Also, it was one anecdote point, and was 15 years ago, and was just 'bad service' but life is too short to try to be putting projects as risk to save a few bucks. Projects/sites generally have enough troubles - dealing with shared hosting is just one more thing that can go wrong, imo.
  - wonderyak 13y ago
    Sounds like you've been using VPSs for a while. Do you have an opinion on the virtualization tech used for various hosts (xen, virtuozzo, etc).

slig 13y ago

I've been hosting small sites on WebFaction <https://www.webfaction.com/> https://www.webfaction.com/>. I never had problems of downtime and the support has been reasonably responsive the couple of times I needed.

pjbrunet 13y ago
You never had trouble but come back here in few years. WebFaction registered September 28, 2003. 10 years in business, not bad. But if you start recommending hosts there's going to be a list here 10 miles long.

damon_c 13y ago

I signed up with DreamHost a couple of years ago and they sent me my password in plaintext in the confirmation email. Am I wrong to have walked away immediately?