Dreamhost question

[mattscott306]

OK- I'm looking at getting a domain and hosting from dreamhost but I have a question. Their price's look about normal, but they list 157.6 GB of disk storage, and 1.576 TB of monthly band-with at sign-up. Those numbers really blow any of the other hosting services I have looked at out of the water, is there some missing disclaimer I'm not seeing?

 

[Eraserhead]

How much are you paying for this service?

EDIT: That's insane monthly bandwidth .

 

[mnkeybsness]

...is there some missing disclaimer I'm not seeing?

The part where they have terrible uptime, process speeds and support.

 

[mattscott306]

How much are you paying for this service?

EDIT: That's insane monthly bandwidth .

Yeah it is, which is what's making me wonder about it. It just seems way to good to be true, but if it is true I wanna jump on it before it gets changed.

The part where they have terrible uptime, process speeds and support.

Ok- then I'll look elsewhere.
Hasweb looks good, do they have the same issues?

 

[Lone Deranger]

I've heard people over on CGTalk speak positively about Dreamhost with no mention of terrible uptimes or support. Are you merely speculating or have you personal experience with them?

To put things in perspective, I've been told that the reason why they are able to offer such numbers is because the vast majority of Dreamhost users never even come close to their limits.

One has to wonder......

The part where they have terrible uptime, process speeds and support.

 

[Winterfell]

We host WeNeverForgot (see sig) with Dreamhost, and have been there for over a year.

Their support is actually _very_ good, as they are, for the most part, geeks like some of us.

A little while back they had a lot of technical problems (probably what mnkeybsness is alluding to), most of which weren't directly a fault of theirs, but what impressed me was how open they were about it. They explained everything on their blog. It goes against the grain of most companies to be that open, and needless to say, I was very surprised.

I can't remember any significant downtime in the past six months or so; when I get around to putting together a few more sites, I will have no second thoughts about using them again.

 

[tominated]

i'd look into eboundhost. there servers are really fast and I haven't had proble that they couldn't fix almost instantly. BTW: they have good space and bandwidth for really cheap!

 

[mnkeybsness]

I had Dreamhost for 2 years. There responses to support were minimal, if ever received. Entire servers would go down for about half a day at a time and they wouldn't aknowledge that they were down. They oversell space on shared hosting, which creates for slow processing speeds and slow bandwidth.

Here's quite a few links to indulge (about 420,000 pages of why dreamhost sucks)

 

[Winterfell]

They were horrible and you stayed with them for two whole years. Quite a commitment.

As with all things, your mileage may vary. I've had good experiences with them. Other people have had bad experiences with them. I've no doubt you would find the same thing with any other hosting provider.

Everything in life's a gamble. So pick something and get on with it.

 

[radiantm3]

I was with them for about a year before I moved to mediatemple. They had some growing pains, but for the most part, they provided good service. I think they are a good solution for personal websites.

 

[Eraserhead]

They were horrible and you stayed with them for two whole years. Quite a commitment.

Well you get a better deal on two years of hosting, which is probably why.

FWIW, everyone recommends A Small Orange. Me, eDesignUK and iGary use them, if you don't need the bandwidth/storage space that Dreamhost offers then they are worth looking at, and they offer excellent customer service too.

 

[virus1]

I am clearly in my own ignorant world, assuming everybody knows about SiteGround. Highly recommended. Usually respond to support in 5 min, but 15 is guaranteed. About $7/ month for 250GB of storage and 2500GB of bandwidth.

 

[Knox]

OK- I'm looking at getting a domain and hosting from dreamhost but I have a question. Their price's look about normal, but they list 157.6 GB of disk storage, and 1.576 TB of monthly band-with at sign-up. Those numbers really blow any of the other hosting services I have looked at out of the water, is there some missing disclaimer I'm not seeing?

Dreamhost is an extreme example of what basically every hosting provider does - that is, set their prices based not on the maximum usage but the average usage. For example, the average customer may only use 3GB a month bandwidth and 300MB of disk space, so in that case the price is based on what it costs Dreamhost to host that size of site.

The problem with the strategy comes when a larger than expected number of customers use more than the average disk/bandwidth amounts. When that happens they wouldn't have the necessary capacity in place and the servers would be stretched, causing downtime and/or other problems.

As radiantm3 said, it's probably fine for personal sites, but I would think twice about using them for anything vaguely critical.

 

[besler3035]

I've got Dreamhost and have no complaints. Their webmail package sucks, but you can easily port that over to Google for your Domain. Never had a problem with uptimes or my site being taken down or anything like that.

 

[mnkeybsness]

They were horrible and you stayed with them for two whole years. Quite a commitment.

I had a two year contract. It just ended, but I've been using a different host for about 8-10 months now.

 

[Makosuke]

I've been with DreamHost since 1998, and although they had two bad spells of growing pains, for the most part I've been quite happy with them as far as shared hosting goes.

They've got a nice control panel, a LOT of nice features, and in my personal experience support queries are dealt with pretty quickly. More recently, I like the fact that they're more transparent than most hosts--if you care to read the blog and status "blog"-thing, they're pretty upfront about what's going on and how they run the business. I find that to be better than the standard "We have servers, give us money." model of a lot of webhosts, even if it makes their shortcomings a lot more obvious.

As for the actual question, yes, you really can use that if you want (though I'm only using a couple gigs of storage and a few gigs of bandwidth spread out over about a dozen sites). Obviously it's based on the law of averages and they couldn't maintain it if EVERYBODY used that much, but then neither could GMail if everybody used the full quota.

The only "catch" is that since it's shared hosting, if you have a website that puts heavy load on the processor, you'll be asked to reduce the load or go with a dedicated server. So if you're serving mostly media files, great option. If you've got a lot of server-side work going on, MediaTemple's grid-based thing is probably a lot better.

Just want to point out that while it's not the right option for everybody (I can and do use WestHost for heavier-duty eCommerce stuff myself), they're not a terrible host. Just depends on what your needs are.

 

[mattscott306]

^^^
Thanks for that review, that was extremely helpful! I'll probably end up going with dreamhost then, at least I'll know when/why the system went down ISO wondering WTH is going on.

If dreamhost uses any referral system stuff, PM your information and I'll make sure you get credit.