I subscribed to Dreamhost in Feb 2005. I quess this could be called "2,5 year review". Feel free to ask questions.
I've been mostly happy with Dreamhost. The server I've been on has been quite fast and really reliable. I've had no big problems with the DB servers or connections. DH does have short downtimes quite often, but most of these are so short that even if your monitoring sees them you might not. Mail is less reliable than I would like, and IMAP is quite slow to use.
There are a lot of features. DH has given me several "whoa, cool!" moments when I discovered how something was implemented. For example, the snapshot backups are truly great and saved me a couple of times. The "Private Server" is a nice new feature. More on that later. One-click installs work and can also be "one-click upgraded". On the other hand, I'm not happy with spam tools.
Support has been slow, but competent. Only one reply was totally bogus and had obviously wrong information.
I live in Finland, and the distance occasionally makes the connections slow. This is especially been true with the control panel and IMAP mail. However, more often the slowness has been at the Dreamhost's end. Dreamhost pushes a lot of data through their network, and when the network is slow you really can feel it. Unfortunately they've had "core router issues" several times in the last year.
The last few weeks
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2007/08/21/it-all-falls-down/have been rough. The core router issues were back, and indirectly caused their DNS update script to start eating the DNS records, which dropped many sites from the face of the net. And this is no ordinary downtime: if your DNS records are borked, even the mail doesn't work for a day or two. I lost some mail because of this downtime.
There are hordes of people complaining about the latest downtimes in the
Dreamhoststatus blog.
Dreamhost PS
Dreamhost Private Server is
Linux Vserver -based solution. You have no root, but your own protected process space. Pretty much the same as shared server, only not as much shared. The PS are on their own servers, and you pay extra in top of your shared hosting bill based on your chosen resource maximums.
Dreamhost's control panel has “Adjust CPU/Memory” bar for the PS. You can adjust the memory and CPU in almost real time. The implementation hides the technical details and makes it look really easy. Also, there has to be a lot of legroom on these servers, since the users are constantly fiddling with their sliders.
The downside: the minimum 150Mhz/150MB(+150MB swap) is not going to get you anywhere. If you run out of memory+swap, the PHP scripts instantly give the Internal Server Error. While it’s really easy to up the memory, it’s quite hard to see exactly what’s going on. Having no root access and no possibility to install Apache modules makes the problem even worse.
I had some initial problems to get the PS to work correctly. The network problems (read above) didn't help.
Conclusion
I've said that Dreamhost have given me more than I've paid for. This is especially true if you compare them to the cheap hosts in Finland. They have some cool features, and keep adding more nice stuff. DH is great for development, backups and hosting non-critical hobby sites. They've given me two of years of relatively worry-free and cheap hosting, which was nice because I didn't have the budget for much more.
However, I haven't recommended Dreamhost for serious/business hosting, and I still don't. The reliability just isn't there. Their network is occasionally slow, and they seem to have issues with the CISCO routers. They're growing and trying to build a bigger network, which causes some growing pains.
Dreamhost has attitude (in the most positive meaning of the word), and they've always been polite and friendly.
Lately the reliability has not been good. I could give you an uptime percent, but that probably wouldn't be fair, since I've had some PS-related problems that other users don't see.
I've seriously considered moving some site to a VPS/semidedi. For this price, the problems are not "ridiculous", but they're getting intolerable. However, it's likely that I keep the Dreamhost account.
Linear Mode
