

95% Dreamhost Hosting Discount: Last Day Today - timy2
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2009/01/dreamhost-new-year-hosting-sale/
New Year hosting sale at Dreamhost offers $214.80 package for $10.74 only.
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DanHulton
Dreamhost is unprofessional, has more downtime than I've seen from other
hosts, and has wildly oversold accounts.

And I'd recommend them to ANYBODY.

Allow me to explain:

The very fact that they are unprofessional is probably the number one reason I
like them. When they fuck up, they are right up front admitting it in plain
english, detailing exactly what went wrong, whose fault it was, and what
they're doing to fix it. I'd say that's exactly what OUGHT to be done, but in
any "professional" company, there will be some smooth lie to cover up what
happened, explain it as an "occasional service interruption" and move on.
You'll never know why something happened, or what the chances are of it
happening again. With Dreamhost, I'm always aware, and even if there are major
weaknesses in their networks, at least I know what they are and what they're
doing to fix it. (And who - by name - I can yell at for fucking it up.)

They have more downtime than I've seen from other hosts, but I'm willing to
chalk this up to "circumstances beyond their control". Why? Because when shit
went south, they explained what it was. Their datacenter wasn't up-front with
them about its capabilities, the building generators weren't terribly
reliable, all kinds of things that were out of their control. Sure it sucked
for any Dreamhost user during that time, but it could have happened to any
host, and THIS one had the temerity to level with us and explain exactly what
happened.

And the oversold plans? Actually a feature. Honestly, I don't think I'd host
an actual application on one of their $7/month plans, but that's because
that's not what those are FOR. The cheapie plans are there for my personal
website and my blog. They're there for someone who wants a site to sell
handcrafted things. They're there for someone who wants cheap imagehosting for
forum signatures, avatars, or funny pictures for friends.

Dreamhost sold me exactly what I expected, and has taken the time to routinely
update me on the issues affecting them.

Now, if only Josh could get the newsletter out any faster than a month
behind...

(Hm, before that gets misinterpreted, that's a running joke at Dreamhost, that
each newsletter is dated for the month previous. They do like poking fun at
themselves, another plus as far as I'm concerned.)

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timb
I just signed up for this.

Immediately the web server they gave me went down. Half an hour later, it is
up again, but won't properly serve files:

$ curl <http://danielerrey.com/lib.js>

curl: (18) transfer closed with 19097 bytes remaining to read

Sigh.

~~~
fdb
Same problem here -- just signed up, and none of my media files
(css/png/jpg/gif) get transferred. HTML works fine.

I sent a support request, but this is not a very good first impression.

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dangrover
95%. Which is also, incidentally, their uptime! :)

Actually, I have them and I'm pretty happy.

~~~
wheels
I've been using Dreamhost for about three years. I have monitoring running on
my services. It's probably been down for a total of about 5 hours in that
time. It's never taken them more than 2 hours to respond to a support request.
On the whole, they've significantly exceeded my expectations for cheapo
hosting.

It's definitely not suited for heavy web apps (SugarCRM, notably, is painfully
slow), but it does fine with things like Wordpress.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
As a counter note, I had been using them for about 16 months straight, ending
about a year ago. During the time I was onboard, my monitoring services
recorded about 30 different occasions when my server/cluster went offline,
each for generally about 30-120 minutes at a time; there was one month that my
cluster had seven or eight outages, one of which was for nearly a day.

When users (like me) are relying on the server to host email accounts, mailing
lists, and subversion repositories, downtimes like that are just absurd.

Good thing though is that I absolutely love Slicehost, and for only a little
bit more $/mo, I have a VPS solution that hasn't gone down even once since I
signed up. The only downside is that setting up your own email server is a
pain in the ass... :P

~~~
Zev
FWIW, Dreamhost doesn't even recommend hosting email on their servers, even if
they offer the ability to do so if the user wants. They're trying to migrate
people off to Google's custom domain services.

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andyking
Are they any good though? I'm looking at hosting for a single Wordpress blog
at present (well, actually, I signed up for a host a fortnight ago, they took
my money and never got back to me, so I'm looking AGAIN).

But claims like "Storage: UNLIMITED + 50GB!" put me off a little. Aside from
it being a physical impossibility, I don't even need 1GB of storage. What's
Dreamhost actually like? They seem to be trying to tempt people in with big
numbers on the homepage, which is the sort of marketing used most often by
ripoff merchants.

~~~
wesley
<http://www.google.com/search?q=dreamhost+sucks>

~~~
DanHulton
The number one article for that search "Why Dreamhost Sucks" has a whole bunch
of referral ads for Dreamhost in it, making it ultimately not very credible.
Just fair warning.

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asnyder
I use to have a dreamhost account, but then switched to bluehost
(<http://www.bluehost.com>) based on the recommendation of a friend, and found
them to be more reliable and supportive while keeping much of the dreamhost
feel.

A friend of mine blogs about his experience with the two here:
<http://www.danshafer.com/onemind/node/807>

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timothyandrew
It says 'promo code not valid in your region' for me. I'm in India.

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tlrobinson
They hooked me a couple years ago with one of these deals. I now pay $10 /
months but I haven't had any problems.

And _thats_ how they can afford to give 95%.

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m0nty
Quite happy with that - thanks for the tip :) I need a website for my open
source project, plus I want to test out a few domain/product ideas so that's
ideal.

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yogione
Promo code 202 is up to $30 now. I got a free domain name registered also.
Can't beat the price for hobby projects.

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Tichy
Any reasons not to buy? Not sure I understand the type of account, is it a
virtual root server?

~~~
ovi256
No, seems to be shared hosting. VPS is +15$/month.

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Herring
Promo code 202 is up to $21.48 now.

~~~
snorkel
$29.95 now.

~~~
NyxWulf
I just did it and it was up to 41.95

