Growing Pains or Death Spiral?
Written: Oct 07 '06
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Account set-up: |
 |
|
| Web page loading time: |
 |
|
| Quality of customer support: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Tons of disk and bandwidth, shared servers not severely overloaded, lots of goodies.
Cons: None of the pros matter when your servers are down or acting flaky.
The Bottom Line: Not recommended until they solve chronic network problems and rewrite their panel.
|
|
|
| neurophyre's Full Review: Dreamhost |
I switched from Pair Networks to Dreamhost in summer of 2004 because Pair Networks was just too expensive despite spectacular reliability. Dreamhost offered much more in the way of features, disk and bandwidth. I didn't expect quite the same uptime as Pair considering the price point, but things generally worked out quite well. The panel is slow and somewhat buggy, but I could live with it.
Enter 2006. It was becoming apparent that Dreamhost was having growing pains. Things weren't too bad at the beginning of the year through the start of second quarter, but were noticeably worsening. High server load, poor database response, and chronically flaky mail servers.
Unfortunately, this trend turned into a downward spiral which became a catastrophe when there were two major power failures in the building housing the Dreamhost data center. While the power failures weren't Dreamhost's fault, many of the resulting problems were. The original power failure occurred in JULY and Dreamhost's network is still shaky in OCTOBER.
Contrary to all common sense, Dreamhost is still rolling out features and increasing disk and bandwidth allowance instead of FIXING PROBLEMS. Users don't care about features as much as they care about sites that work, databases that don't crawl, and mail servers that forget passwords or fail to relay outbound mail on average ONCE A DAY.
24 hour support turnaround is a crapshoot these days as well.
Recommended:
No
Monthly fees (US$): $19.95 for Code Monster
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
neurophyre
|
|
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.