Dreamhost NOT recommended
In the past I have recommended Dreamhost as a hosting service, but after numerous problems with them in the past months, I would like to point out that I no longer recommend Dreamhost. In fact, I am in search for another hosting service that has much more reliable service and offers better and faster customer support. Two of my important sites - eszter.com and webuse.org - are down this morning for no apparent reason. Moreover, the error message that comes up makes it seem as though the fault was mine yet I have done nothing to the sites in days so it’s not possible that any action on my part would have led to this outage.
Crooked Timber is also hosted at Dreamhost and that site was down for several hours late last week. (I should note that neither of these have to do with the electricity problems in LA that I know affected numerous other sites as well.)
A few days ago, my Web Use News blog (down now) went completely crazy and although the top page worked, all of the underlying links - including the ones to simple entry archives - were inaccessible. Then suddenly an hour later all was okay again.
This is unbelievably unreliable service and is not an option for sites that have a professional purpose. I welcome suggestions for alternatives.
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September 19th, 2005 at 11:28 pm
[…] Dreamhost continues to misbehave so I’m considering a backup of my Web Use News blog. […]
September 20th, 2005 at 12:40 am
Salut Hehe,
It’s nice of you to post that as I was just looking for hosting for a friend and recommending dreamhost (b/c of your previous post - I rescinded my rec’). I have looked around and I found that bluehost seems to have a nice offer (complete with ssh acess and all) - http://www.bluehost.com/tell_me_more.html . Has anyone has any good/bad experience with them ?
– Dede
September 20th, 2005 at 8:38 am
Salut Dede!:) I hadn’t heard of Bluehost (I don’t think), but it does look promising. I couldn’t find any info about what mailing list software they use though. (I must’ve missed the category on the cPanel.) Does anyone have info on that?
September 20th, 2005 at 11:34 am
I have installed Dadamail which is a lightweight and nice to use cgi-script that can be user-installed in 10 minutes.
September 20th, 2005 at 11:40 am
Thanks, Dede, I’ll have to look into it. Of course, last time you told me about an easy-to-use service (Gallery), I ended up losing several days to it;-).. not to mention the entire gallery once the code started going weird things I could no longer follow. The Bluehost description of services seemed to imply that they support mailing lists so I was trying to figure out what’s included in their service.
September 20th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Shall I blame your troubles with gallery on dreamhost as well ?
Dadamail was used and vetted by one of my tech-phobic friends so it can’t be all that bad.
September 20th, 2005 at 2:58 pm
For what it’s worth, I recommend http://www.ace-host.net
I use Ace-Net and though I have had downtime on two occasions, customer service has always responded within an hour. It comes out to $4/mo for my site.
September 20th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Thanks, Claudia, I’ll have to keep that in mind. If I end up going with it, I’ll be sure to click on this link so you get the referral credit (I grabbed that from your site).