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> I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not great, but it's better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else. It's notably worse than

> I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not great, but it's better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else. It's notably worse than a number of other commodity experiences I've had. Dreamhost aggressively oversells. They're hardly unique in this, but they admit and embrace it like nobody else I've seen. Because of this, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to in order for everything to actually work. If you break the unwritten rules (even if you haven't broken the written ones), they will shut you down (sometimes without notice) and accept your cranky departure if you're unhappy about it. Or maybe before then they'll have a severe service outage that causes you grief, make a funny blog post about it, and despite your amusement, you'll get the sense that something wasn't really addressed and leave. If I had to recommend any shared hosting I've been on, it'd be Hurricane Electric. Over the decade I kept a small account there, my experience was the opposite of Dreamhost: they may have given less for the price, but they stood totally behind it (and a little further) and were always up.

stevewillows 13y ago
I've been with Dreamhost for quite a long time. Dreamhost is like a decent all-you-can-eat sushi bar. Not the best product, but it's worth the money you pay. As you said though, their goofy attitude toward outages and such isn't good. I like the transparency of their status site, but when shit goes wrong I don't want a cat-meme reference.
- furyg3 13y ago
  The sushi bar is a decent analogy. I use dreamhost as a sort of project sandbox, and for that it works pretty well. If you need a place to do a one-click install of wordpress or some other project, or just a shell to bypass some firewall, upload some large files for a while, it's great. I would never, ever put anything where I needed real uptime on Dreamhost, because performance varies wildly. If a project was getting serious, I'd use Linode, Rackspace, or Amazon. I also recommend to everyone that they separate out their domain name purchases from their hosting provider.
  - FedRegister 13y ago
    I make it a point to always separate the following things, especially with services that I run for others: Domain name purchases DNS hosting Email hosting Web hosting That way any of the layers in the stack can be replace with sufficient planning and if, say, email is down then the web hosting should still work.
ibelong2u 13y ago
With it's low price point and a very user friendly admin panel, I too would recommend Dreamhost's shared hosting service. I've had a good experience with their customer service and they have some nice bells and whistles such as automated backups, PageSpeed, Railgun (cloudflare), being carbon neutral, etc. We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans. As you would imagine, the server performance on any shared hosting depends on you and your neighbors adhering to them. I'll agree with you, shutting down a customer without notice is not acceptable. Maybe if a customer is actively trying to scam the hosting provider by violating the terms... but I think even in that case, customer should be given a 24 hour eviction notice so that they have time to transition elsewhere.
- wwweston 13y ago
  > We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. If you look carefully, you can find providers of shared hosting who will be honest about what they're selling you in terms of capacity and that you can rely on. DreamHost is not one of those businesses. > There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans. Something something the road to hell something...
hobbes 13y ago
Seconded. When Dreamhost works, it is excellent. When it fails, it fails really, really badly and the support is often shockingly inept. Just two examples from my painful membership: 1. I transferred a domain back into Dreamhost. Due to a bug in their system, it was immediately dropped and entered the redemption period, and asked me for a large redemption fee. Support was wholly unable to acknowledge any problem on their part, and only resolved it when I posted the issue on Webhostingtalk.com 2. After requesting a refund onto my credit card after another hideous incident, rather than crediting my card, they debited it. Again, support were completely unable to acknowledge any problem on their part. Instead, when I asked the reason why my card was debited, they said I was charged for "services" - but were unable to itemise the services I had been charged for when challenged. They only refunded the money as "courtesy" rather than an acknowledgement on their part. Dreadful. If your storage requirements are small, I strongly recommend medialayer.com. For a budget option, I recommend asmallorange.com

stevewillows 13y ago

I've been with Dreamhost for quite a long time. Dreamhost is like a decent all-you-can-eat sushi bar. Not the best product, but it's worth the money you pay. As you said though, their goofy attitude toward outages and such isn't good. I like the transparency of their status site, but when shit goes wrong I don't want a cat-meme reference.

furyg3 13y ago
The sushi bar is a decent analogy. I use dreamhost as a sort of project sandbox, and for that it works pretty well. If you need a place to do a one-click install of wordpress or some other project, or just a shell to bypass some firewall, upload some large files for a while, it's great. I would never, ever put anything where I needed real uptime on Dreamhost, because performance varies wildly. If a project was getting serious, I'd use Linode, Rackspace, or Amazon. I also recommend to everyone that they separate out their domain name purchases from their hosting provider.
- FedRegister 13y ago
  I make it a point to always separate the following things, especially with services that I run for others: Domain name purchases DNS hosting Email hosting Web hosting That way any of the layers in the stack can be replace with sufficient planning and if, say, email is down then the web hosting should still work.

ibelong2u 13y ago

With it's low price point and a very user friendly admin panel, I too would recommend Dreamhost's shared hosting service. I've had a good experience with their customer service and they have some nice bells and whistles such as automated backups, PageSpeed, Railgun (cloudflare), being carbon neutral, etc. We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans. As you would imagine, the server performance on any shared hosting depends on you and your neighbors adhering to them. I'll agree with you, shutting down a customer without notice is not acceptable. Maybe if a customer is actively trying to scam the hosting provider by violating the terms... but I think even in that case, customer should be given a 24 hour eviction notice so that they have time to transition elsewhere.

wwweston 13y ago
> We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. If you look carefully, you can find providers of shared hosting who will be honest about what they're selling you in terms of capacity and that you can rely on. DreamHost is not one of those businesses. > There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans. Something something the road to hell something...

hobbes 13y ago

Seconded. When Dreamhost works, it is excellent. When it fails, it fails really, really badly and the support is often shockingly inept. Just two examples from my painful membership: 1. I transferred a domain back into Dreamhost. Due to a bug in their system, it was immediately dropped and entered the redemption period, and asked me for a large redemption fee. Support was wholly unable to acknowledge any problem on their part, and only resolved it when I posted the issue on Webhostingtalk.com 2. After requesting a refund onto my credit card after another hideous incident, rather than crediting my card, they debited it. Again, support were completely unable to acknowledge any problem on their part. Instead, when I asked the reason why my card was debited, they said I was charged for "services" - but were unable to itemise the services I had been charged for when challenged. They only refunded the money as "courtesy" rather than an acknowledgement on their part. Dreadful. If your storage requirements are small, I strongly recommend medialayer.com. For a budget option, I recommend asmallorange.com