

Dreamhost St. Patrick's 92% off - mapleoin
http://dreamhost.com/

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daleharvey
Dreamhost have a pretty bad reputation, but its amazingly good value as long
as you understand a few things.

You arent going to be live 24/7, in the 4 years or so ive been with them I
have been down 3 times for more than a day, and a few sporadic is it down / is
it up moments.

It isnt going to be the fastest connection in the world, mine is reasonably
fast, but it has slow moments.

people hosting business critical applications are just asking for trouble.

but past that, you have a lot of preinstalled software, svn takes a minute to
set up, ssh access which you can install most things you want on and a silly
amount of bandwidth / space. its pretty perfect for a first host, to put a
blog up and share images folder etc.

Part of their bad reputation is from how transparent they are, they are honest
about when they go down and what the fault is, their sense of humour about
everything grates some people, but I appreciate not being given a canned
coorporate response

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krschultz
It has been recommended a lot on hacker news before, I didn't realize it had a
negative connotation. I just signed up for a year, previously was hosting off
a local machine for my personal stuff, for $10 a year I'll make it someone
else's problem. We use Engine Yard for our business stuff, but can't beat this
for personal.

~~~
lux
For personal or non-critical sites, Dreamhost are great.

Their reputation stems from the fact that they publish their issues openly on
a blog with comments enabled and zero moderation (dreamhoststatus.com). So the
kicking and screaming that goes on when sites are down (and all shared hosts
go down about the same on average) is publicly visible. This both damages
their reputation compared to hosts without such a public forum for venting,
and strengthens it on the honesty side of things too.

I've used them for several years though for non-critical sites and I've been
as happy with them as with any other shared host (and I've used quite a few
over the years).

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tlrobinson
I got one of these deals a few years ago... and I'm still with them paying
$9.95, _per month_.

They really get you hooked by giving you the first year for essentially free,
and hoping you're just too lazy (like me) to switch after a year.

As for the actual service, I haven't had many problems.

Though I have noticed recently they aggressively cache some things (PHP pages
that don't change?), which can make development very difficult. Anyone else
notice this? Any workarounds.

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mokchuk_
If you want to see how much downtime they have see:
<http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/>

also a twitter feed <http://twitter.com/dhstatus>

As a customer for the past 6 months, I have on occasions been unable to access
the web based admin panel

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proee
Is there any way for existing customer to get a discount on signing up for
another year of hosting?

~~~
dawie
Not at all. They are bastards! I haven't used them for about a year. I have
been thinking about getting an account for a while now. Saw the special and
decided to sign up. No, I can't since I was a customer on the past.

So F#%& them, I am not going to sign up!

~~~
jonknee
Yea, F them for not giving you the new customer 90% off promotion! Greedy
bastards. (They have this to get new customers, you have already come and gone
and most likely won't stick around to the point of profitability.)

~~~
reconbot
Don't bother with them if you want anything more then a personal site. Their
slowness and downtime will eat any commercial site alive. I'm a long time
member but I can't use them for more then my blog and photos (I have lots and
lots - more then 10 gigs and that would fill up most vps's) because when it
comes to sites for other people you'll just loose customers.

I'm editing to add that I'm looking for a way to move my gallery (10+ gigs of
photos) over to slicehost with a mounted "S3 volume" I'm not sure of the
performance hits, but I'm willing to bet I'll get a faster site out of it.

~~~
jonknee
With what they charge I don't see how you could even assume it's rock solid
hosting. I have an account I use for backups and have no complaints. They are
asking for a 10 spot in exchange for a year of hosting and a free domain name.
Put it in perspective, that's less than the cost of a pizza.

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Timothee
It's surprising to see that coupon right on their homepage. Companies tend to
be semi-open on great discounts. (meaning, they usually don't get out of their
way that much to tell you you can save money)

However, as far as I'm concerned, that works: after looking at the features
(pretty much everything seems to be available, unlimited), I'm considering it.

Anybody has any feedback on Dreamhost?

~~~
firebug
I've heard they have problems with Django but handle Rails well (as of
December, at least). Don't know if that has changed recently.

~~~
cdr
This was posted recently on HN, should help:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514430>

~~~
firebug
Thanks. That's actually going to help me a lot.

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firebug
Are there bandwidth/data limitations with this deal?

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palish
<http://dreamhost.com/unlimited.html>

"What's not allowed in 'Unlimited'? Basically, sites whose essential purpose
is to use disk or bandwidth.

When making a website, you should be thinking about "How can I make an
interesting site for my visitors while minimizing my server storage,
bandwidth, file system, memory, and cpu impact as much as possible?"

The result will be a better experience for your visitors, your web host, and
yourself!

Here are some specific examples of things not allowed:

\- Copyrighted content you are not the copyright holder of.

\- File upload / sharing / archive / backup / mirroring / distribution sites.

\- A site created primarily to drive traffic to another site. Making your
account resources available (whether for free or pay) to the general public."

~~~
patio11
_When making a website, you should be thinking about..._

... how sweet it is to not be on shared hosting anymore.

