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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I have them, and I can't say that I'm a fan. I use it as an image host, and its very slow. Also once a file I hosted got popular and they shut it down after 5GB bw got used up in 2 hours.
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.
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.
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.)