Some Random Dude

I am pretty much ok with their service. I have only had one severe downtime issue in the last 6 months for a couple of hours. I use siteuptime.com to monitor my site 24/7. Overall, I think it is a decent service. I used bluehost but it was so horrible I got rid of it within a week. you may try 1and1.

Very good to know venkat, thanks for the additional research material. :)

I’d say skip them. I had so much downtime and slowness I finally bailed. Take a look at dreamhoststatus.com and look at their recent issues, and be sure to read the comments of their customers to see how pissed they get at DH’s ho-hum attitude towards the issues.

hmmm a monitoring service I have on a dreamhost account shows sporadic downtime a few times a month. Mysql performance isn’t great, and if you try to wget a file off a dreamhost server to a real one, the speed is laughable. Their custom control panel I find a study in style over useability. They’ve had a few major outages and all sorts of cock ups in the last year or two that they just laugh off in a childish and unprofessional manner (read their newsletter, it’s like reading something written by a 10 year old who has had a few cans of fizzy pop too many).

They do offer a reasonable features for the cash, but you could spend an extra couple bucks and get a vps from slicehost which is probably a better bet.

All of the domains we host with dreamhost (20+) have been incredibly slow for the past couple weeks, and everything has been down for the last 7 hours. Support does not respond with any sort of urgency even if your site is down – I still haven’t heard back and its been 6.5 hours since I put in a trouble ticket.

So, if you are looking for reliability and good support, DO NOT choose dreamhost.

To go against the grain a little bit, I would recommend Dreamhost. I’ve been with them for 3 years and in that time there has been two major downtimes… But, what you get for the money is pretty phenomenal. Stuff like the subversion hosting is really useful. I’ve not used another host in 3+ years so I can’t comment on what other host’s control panels are like but the dreamhost one gives me all the power I need over setting up domains (including choosing version of PHP and stuff), subdomains, mail, users (ftp and shell), subversion and lots more. And it costs peanuts.

Support isn’t very fast but to be honest I hardly ever need it.

I probably wouldn’t use it for a totally mission critical site but have no problem recommending it to clients with fairly normal demands…

Hope that helps confuse you further…

I don’t know about DreamHost, but I can recommend MediaTemple. I have switched from host to host several times and haven’t been happy until I landed with MediaTemple. They are a little more expensive, but it is worth it for the peace of mind. Good luck.

Don’t switch to DH. Servers are overloaded, support answers are slow and a lot of issues. Can’t really sleep well with DH… But great deal, you will get a lot of stuff, but working when they want…

Thanks everyone for all the good thoughts. I think you’ve put a little hesitation in my step towards DH. I really appreciate the information!

i use em and they suck
i had a google-anche once where I got a ton of hits, and my site was toastie… then finally got it back up, but after that they ‘throttled’ it, so it has a botteneck of connections at once, so it takes forever to begin loading… so it friggin sux my cack……. and I dunno why I am still with them I must be masochistic….(and cheap).
excuse the run on sentence.

I’ve also used dreamhost this year, but I won’t continue. It’s nice to have so much space, but the slowness of the servers will prevent you from using it. Even uploading a simple wordpress theme takes like 10 minutes with ftp.

I hate Dreamhost, seriously. Noone’s perfect but DH is a full of outage hosting company. However, it’s the only share host company that accept me as a customer. I was rejected to 1and1, LunarPages, HostGator and just early on HostICan. DH is the only one who accept me (and Media Temple but i don’t have the budget to buy their plans as yet), so i have no choice and poor in comparison. But, if you have choices, don’t choose Dreamhost.