Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Dreamhost - 1+ year review

[jrbeilke]

Well, I hadn't seen a review for Dreamhost lately so I thought I write about my experiences with them.

I originally registered for Dreamhost in April '07, on their "Crazy Domain Insane" Plan (I prepaid for a full year for $29.40!!!):
Disk Storage: 200GB (Grows 2GB/week)
Monthly Bandwidth: 2TB (Grows 40GB/week)
Unlimited Domains, MySQL Databases, and FTP Accounts
PHP 4 and 5
Perl Support
Python Support
Ruby on Rails
Enhanced Web Security
One-Click Installs (Wordpress, Zen Cart, etc.)

Setup was a breeze and everything was up and running within minutes. I setup my domains with the Dreamhost Nameservers, and the DNS changes began to propagate. For the first 6-8 months I had no problems, my sites responded quickly, and the few times I had to contact support the were very helpful and quick to respond (subdomain DNS issues for one of my sites).

Then right after christmas they had the big billing fiasco (read: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/01/20/billing-issues-update/), and I ended up getting charged for another full year of hosting (resolved within the next day or two).

Well April rolled around again and I decided to renew my account as I had relatively few issues and didn't want to deal with moving all of my sites to a new host. I was hoping to renew my account and use a coupon like I had the first time around, but Dreamhost no longer offers my plan (they only have a 1 size fits all plan now). I bit the bullet and renewed my plan for another year to lower the price to $120 ($10/month), and I was off on another year of Dreamhost.

Right around this time I had also started to move some of my client sites over to Dreamhost, and we started having more and more issues (DNS, slow response times, slow connections). I also experienced an outage or two with no warning from Dreamhost (supposedly planned).

Dreamhost has a status blog available at: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ where you can read about the latest status updates, problems, follow up, etc. And I've found it helpful in the past to go here to get my updates (Dreamhost doesn't like to send email updates or alerts when they are making changes), but trying to explain this problems to my clients when I don't even get a heads-up from Dreamhost is a real pain.

Fast forward to August, and I am experiencing MySQL outages and slow slow slow connections/queries, as well as network troubles with Dreamhosts' bandwidth provider. Support has been reasonably quick to respond (telling me they're working on it), and the Status blog has some information as to what's been happening, but I think it's time for me to move on.

So in conclusion, you get what you pay for (and in Dreamhosts' case, that's a cheap shared hosting account). In fact, if I didn't rely so much on sites with MySQL (Wordpress/Zen Cart/vBulletin/etc.), I would probably stay with Dreamhost, as I have found their servers to be rather speedy and not overloaded/oversold (at least on the CPU side of things, not their MySQL servers).

Final Dreamhost Ratings:
Uptime and Reliability: 7/10
Server and Connection Speed: 6/10
Tech Support: 8/10
Customer Service: 8/10
Value: 9/10

Final Score: 7.6/10

(Sorry if this review seems a little jumbled as it's my first time writing a formal review here at WHT)

[john90]

Good review. Nicely detailed

If you haven't done so you need to post a domain to make it valid, or hit the report button to send it to the mods.

[jrbeilke]

Thanks!

Not sure what you mean by post a domain, but I did send a report with the domain to the mods.

[Hostamina]

Originally Posted by jrbeilke

So in conclusion, you get what you pay for (and in Dreamhosts' case, that's a cheap shared hosting account). In fact, if I didn't rely so much on sites with MySQL (Wordpress/Zen Cart/vBulletin/etc.), I would probably stay with Dreamhost, as I have found their servers to be rather speedy and not overloaded/oversold (at least on the CPU side of things, not their MySQL servers).

Looks to me like they actually did overload/oversell the server you were on, unless you're saying the MySQL was run on a separate server, which I doubt is the case...

[Henrik]

Originally Posted by Hostamina

Looks to me like they actually did overload/oversell the server you were on, unless you're saying the MySQL was run on a separate server, which I doubt is the case...

I actually think their MySQL servers are separate from the servers running apache etc.

[jrbeilke]

You are correct on the seperate MySQL Server. Dreamhost seperates your website/webserver from the MySQL server, which is what I have been having the most problems with (latency issues and network troubles, although they tell me the MySQL server itself is fine).

[Hostamina]

Originally Posted by jrbeilke

You are correct on the seperate MySQL Server. Dreamhost seperates your website/webserver from the MySQL server, which is what I have been having the most problems with (latency issues and network troubles, although they tell me the MySQL server itself is fine).

Oh, excuse my remark on that then. Well maybe they overloaded that server then? lol.

[jrbeilke]

Possibly, here's the last response I had from Dreamhost Support on the MySQL issues I've been having:

So, I spoke with an admin and found that the port on the switch that the
MySQL server uses was being saturated with traffic around the time you
reported this issue. That was happening for about an hour, but seems to
have dropped off now, making the server accessible again. The admin will
continue to monitor the server, as it seems another admin may have
resolved that issue already.

That was almost a week ago now and I'm still having MySQL issues on some of my sites every so often.

[Fizzadar]

Excellent review!

[ldcdc]

jrbeilke has provided a domain hosted by Dreamhost. Thank you for the cooperation, and taking the time to write a quality review!

[steven99]

Originally Posted by jrbeilke

In fact, if I didn't rely so much on sites with MySQL (Wordpress/Zen Cart/vBulletin/etc.)[...]

With some scripts, wordpress for example, they have caching that would reduce the queries to the mysql server , speeding up the site in such cases. So, if you go or stay with them, you may want to look at using the caching.

[jrbeilke]

I have been using caching on all of my dynamic sites (WP Super Cache for Wordpress, vBulletin built-in caching, etc.) and it has helped keep me going this far. But caching doesn't make up for the slow MySQL server performance, and there are just some things you can't cache (comments, for example, is one thing where you really notice the MySQL performance hit).

[jrbeilke]

Just wanted to let everyone know that I've cross posted this review to my blog here:
http://www.moongrabber.com/web-desig...ting-in-review

I am in the process of trying out a few different hosts as a replacement for Dreamhost, so look for some new reviews from me in the future (LiquidWeb is going to be the first test/victim?).

[CrazyPenguin]

A very good job on your review jrbeilke.

[charlesmullen]

Good job on the review. Very detailed