Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Dreamhost hits rock bottom.

[CALGZS]

I've used Dreamhost since the first they put their 777 deal. Each year they offered it again, I renewed with no real intention on using the site other than giving my buddies some movies I made, or random things of that nature.


To present:

I purchased the "crazy 777" deal again, 20GB/1TB as you all know... and the problems start.

Initially I purchased this site with the intent on using it for a community I am part of. CAL (Cyber Amateur League) is a group of us gamers that chit chat about the games, our matches, ect ect.... and I was offering free hosting for videos made of a match, or anything game related in attempt to create a closer community.

I attempted to create a subdomain that only gave me an error in which they said would be fixed within 24 hours. It took two weeks.

So, I figured the pain was gone and I can get on with my site.


So, after the subdomain being fixed, people began to use my services and uploaded their movies.

20 KB'S. 20.

Not 100, not 500, 20.

So, I dispatched another ticket. The support person asked me for a traceroute, in which I provided. The route obviously dropped at their uplink going out of their datacenter. I had another person traceroute it, and another.... and another... and another...

All routes dropped at the uplink leaving their datacenter. I had them screen shot the tracert and sent them along with mine.

I get a response that they are experiencing no technical issues and that it's my (along with about 400 other peoples) ISP's that are causing the problem.

So, I kindly reply again and inform them that it's on their end and it needed to be fixed.

The last email I responded to was basically the support person telling me that I'm an idiot and that they are in no wrong doing, and that 130KBs is an acceptable download speed, when I used to get 400 (max from my ISP).

They also noted that I shouldn't promise people that their service is going to be reliable and fast. I got a good giggle out of that one.



So, Dreamhost dropped the ball, who wants to recommend <snipped> a service for my community?

I need ~20 gigs of storage and about a terabyte a month bandwidth........ perfect for Dreamhost's setup.

[timdorr]

If you're pushing that much and want something reliable, you'll need a dedicated box. We all know that DH is massively overselling their services (1TB of bandwidth alone cost in the range of $60-70 per month, even at preferred carrier pricing), so you probably won't find anything decently reliable with that amount of bandwidth in the shared arena.

[JSpired]

Originally Posted by timdorr

If you're pushing that much and want something reliable, you'll need a dedicated box. We all know that DH is massively overselling their services (1TB of bandwidth alone cost in the range of $60-70 per month, even at preferred carrier pricing), so you probably won't find anything decently reliable with that amount of bandwidth in the shared arena.

I completely agree! If you really are pushing that much each month, there's no way a shared server can help you!

[CALGZS]

I appreciate the input Tim and JSpired.

I'll have to check into some different boxes.

[Aussie Bob]

Wow, it's hard to believe that the market is actually starting to expect to push 1TB through a shared server, for peanuts.

CALGZS, if you want to push that much bandwidth, you're going to have to look for a dedicated server. Try someone like theplanet.com or ev1servers.net. You're always going to hit performance issues operating with that resource requirement on a shared server, and paying peanuts for it.

[CALGZS]

Originally Posted by Aussie Bob

Wow, it's hard to believe that the market is actually starting to expect to push 1TB through a shared server, for peanuts.

CALGZS, if you want to push that much bandwidth, you're going to have to look for a dedicated server. Try someone like theplanet.com or ev1servers.net. You're always going to hit performance issues operating with that resource requirement on a shared server, and paying peanuts for it.

Checking into those two now. Thanks for the links.

[Aussie Bob]

No worries. You'll pay a lot more for that 1TB of bandwidth, as compared to the above host, but you'll get some decent performance from it.

[AvailNetworks]

go to layeredtech.com they offer sempron dedicated servers starting at 65/mo they are nice and reliable and should be your answer

[Justin]

CALGZS,

As you appear to have a working knowledge at least to some degree, I'd suggest looking into hosting providers such as layeredtech.com if you won't be requiring much on the support end with your provider. It'll save you some money then. That or if you do need management services either find a provider willing to give it as a reasonably priced addon option or contract out to a company such as rack911, platinumservermanagement or the like.

Note these are just a few suggestions to help you get going. I have not personally used the above companies to give a recommendation however.

Best of luck in your search. Do keep the community in the loop as we may be able to help you out in some guidance on your choices

[nettiapina]

Originally Posted by CALGZS

All routes dropped at the uplink leaving their datacenter. I had them screen shot the tracert and sent them along with mine.

I get a response that they are experiencing no technical issues and that it's my (along with about 400 other peoples) ISP's that are causing the problem.

If you can find that 20-page monster Dreamhost thread, the last page had pretty similar experience from Siet. Oddly the thread was closed soon after that... He found out that Dreamhost or some network between him and them was seriously gapping the data trasfer during US daytime. Siet even did a nice graph of the speeds. The drop was just unreal, from more than 200KB/s to 20-30KB/s. Unless I'm mistaken, Siet is from Europe, so 200-300KB/s is a decent speed.

I've got no insight to add, except that "it works for me". I have two servers doing hourly download tests from Dreamhost server as I'm writing this. Two more were doing it for couple of days. Speeds on the test have been mostly ok. I don't want to sound like trying to refute your findings - there certainly have been some problems in somewhere. I've seen some terrible speeds myself.

Only thing I've seen was a problem in telia.net network in the US end. (Traceroute along with some better working routes seem to confirm this.) But it was only for eight hours.

[zhoujianfu]

First though, some bad news. It was bad news that it took us so long (possibly as long as 3 weeks) to really recognize this was a system-wide problem and to begin to narrow down the cause.

The good news is, we believe the slowness affecting some servers has been fixed for good as of March 2nd!

It turned out that the ether channel between our core1 and core2 routers was maxing out at 1Gbps. This was weird to us because it should have been able to hit 3GBps, but for some reason wasn't.. and it wasn't dropping packets either like you'd normally see when a port becomes saturated.

It turned out the router card itself could only handle 1Gbps, even though it had 3 gige links going out of it! And, it was just queueing up packets rather than dropping them.. resulting in slowness overall for people on servers using core2 as their primary router.

We now switched to using our fiber channel cards which DO support over 1Gbps and things look okay. Right now it's doing about 1.6Gbps.

We're really sorry about this ongoing issue, and we're really happy it looks completely fixed now!

[WireNine]

Sorry to hear about your bad experience. You should never expect to get what you see with oversellers. They offer something and you get something else.

Try dedicatednow.com for their closeout dedicated servers if you have a limited budget, you might find some good deals. Best of luck

[David]

Josh,

Thank you for the updates!
Glad to see things were figured out (although odd that it took that long..)

[ldcdc]

Glad to see things were figured out

Indeed. As they say, better late than never.

[Jhonsmithco]

I really have had a really good experience with dreamhost, I haven't had any problems at all. i've seen uploading of even 300 KB. What i really hate is the control panel, it's the worst I've ever seen. With that kind of BW, you should really go to dedicated, I don't think any shared hosting would allow that kind of performance or really use allll!!! of their bandwith. Most companies are overselling so much that they hardly can keep up, like ixwebhosting, since they increased their HD/BW the service have become so slooow!.