The Net is Dead

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg on web technology, design, life and everything

Commentary

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• At 24 May '07 - 04:49 Miguel Benevides wrote:

  

  I mainly use DH for svn reps and to test code before moving to “real hosting”.
  Those 503 errors are making me so $”#$”#.

  
  

• At 24 May '07 - 07:55 bramn wrote:

  

  You’re not the only having bad experiences with Dreamhost recently. Lately I hear more and more complaints about Dreamhost, mostly from people receiving quite a number of visitors a day.
  I, on the other hand, have no problems with DH, everything still works perfectly. Seems like DH can’t handle the ‘big’ accounts anymore.

  
  

• At 24 May '07 - 08:50 Rose wrote:

  

  Man, this sucks. When I F5 this page several times, it indeed gives some random 503 errors. Hope it’s a temporary and explainable problem for Dreamhost, if not I wish you good luck finding a new webhost.

  
  

• At 24 May '07 - 09:28 Jeff Byrnes wrote:

  

  Yeah, same thing here; one of my sites is completely toast right now. Dreamhost was great when I signed up; seems like they’re having serious growing pains. Seriously contemplating a move to (mt) or something similar.

  
  

• At 24 May '07 - 11:59 Divalicious wrote:

  

  I know someone who switched from Dreamhost because they were so bad. It sucks you have to put up with that crap.

  
  

• At 25 May '07 - 20:40 Elliott Back wrote:

  

  Hey I’ve had the same bad experience… although if you Googled dreamhost sucks you’d already know. Good luck with it… although you might also want to email me, I could probably give an account on my server if you’re not hosting anything bandwidth intensive. CPU load is nothing.

  
  

• At 26 May '07 - 03:54 Bakkel wrote:

  

  I had some mailproblems twice this week. Currently everything is wordking fine. I agree with Bramn, they seem to have some problems with ‘big’ users.
  
  I didn’t have any troubles with mint btw!

  
  

• At 26 May '07 - 14:30 Kyle wrote:

  

  For me, DH has been absolutely stellar lately… no problems at all. There do seem to be a few edge cases (like yourself) that have problems, but I wouldn’t bank your whole judgement on people that write things like “dreamhost sucks” — most of those people I’ve seen generate problems (like installing bad software and blaming DH, or trying to run 10 RoR apps on a shared account, etc). There’s a lot of customers — so there’s a lot of complaints.
  
  Have you written them asking to be moved to a new server? Maybe you’ve just got some bad voodoo on your current one.

  
  

• At 10 July '07 - 00:16 farmerted wrote:

  

  dreamhost has been completely upfront from the beginning.
  
  my pain has “most definately” experienced via “globat”.
  
  twice i have re-registered my domain… only to have it killed a month later by some internal billing system.
  
  yes… fooled twice, shame on me… fooled three times.. THANK GOD I HAVE A BACKUP!!! this time.
  
  by then, my hosting will have been re-located.
  
  rp

  
  

• At 10 July '07 - 02:45 jez wrote:

  

  hey marco,
  I am (at the moment) at dreamhost and they recently told me I was outgrowing their shared hosting, in other words: get a new host or we chuck you off…
  
  I am still searching for a new hoster, got any recommendations?
  also, how did you get those referals at a rate of 1-2 every two months?
  Good job there,
  groetjes,
  jez

  
  

• At 15 August '07 - 11:35 Angry Dog wrote:

  

  Yup I’ve had enough. Moved to DH early 2007, just in time for all the major outages they had, and it has not improved much since. Email (pop3) up and down for weeks in short bursts, and now completely down for the last hour (again). Despite numerous user complaints currently on their dreamhoststatus.com website, their support says that if webmail is up (which it is atm, miraculously) then the problem is with users email client configs (never mind that we haven’t changed anything for months and it was working most of the time until now). Also problems with the server I’m on – put in a support ticket and they confirmed the shared server I’m on has above average load AND stability issues, and now a month later they have done NOTHING to rectify it, and to make matters even worse, since that ticket they have crammed a few more users onto that same server! FUCK DreamHost. I’m sick of trying to be understanding about it, enough is enough. Looking for a new host – any suggestions (not 1

  
  

• At 15 August '07 - 11:38 Angry Dog wrote:

  

  - Not 1

  
  

• At 15 August '07 - 11:58 jez wrote:

  

  mate,
  I switched from DH to zone.net,
  they got a superior quality.
  
  if you care to check them out, go to http://control.zone.net/aff.php?aff=009
  
  (i earn some bucks that way).
  I can sort you out with some promo codes, just drop me a mail at h4×3d.com

  
  

• At 21 August '07 - 11:25 Chuck wrote:

  I am not happy with dreamhost. Their support is arrogant and ineffectual. If I had a good place to switch to, I’d give it serious consideration.
  
  The worst part of dealing with nightmarehost is the lack of phone support

  
  

• At 22 August '07 - 08:51 brian wrote:

  

  http://www.knownhost.com
  
  I was with dreamhost for three weeks back in december before they puked on me — the final straw was their un-released ToS line saying that they didn’t allow more than 50 emails to go out in any 60 minute period. On a decently busy fanfiction site that sends out emails to let users know of updates, not being reliably send out email is just not acceptable. I switched to a KH vps on jan 4 this year and haven’t looked back. Their support is awesome and timely and very polite and just all around kick-butt.
  
  If you don’t believe me, read their forums and ask questions. I did.

  
  

• At 21 October '07 - 14:29 Nathan Smith wrote:

  

  Marco: I too had problems with Dreamhost. I went from DH to Media Temple, but switched again to Mosso. So far, so good. At least Mosso has 24/7 tech support via live chat.

  
  

• At 21 October '07 - 15:38 Marco wrote:

  

  Hi Nathan!
  
  To be honest I think DH’s quality of service has improved a lot since I wrote this post. They’ve been genuinely helpful and response times have been very fast. In addition to that I received very nice support when my site got hit by the Digg effect earlier.
  
  I’ve actually decided to renew for a next year before considering switching to MT. I heard equally bad stories about them though which is why I figured I’d just stick with DH for now. Lately they’ve been absolutely great for me.

  
  

• At 22 October '07 - 02:43 weefselkweekje wrote:

  

  I’m hosted at Hosting Zoom right now because everyone kept telling me how great they were. Well, it’s been a mixed bag at best and the lesson I drew from this is never to go by recommendations alone. But what else do you have to go by?
  
  A friend of mine actually runs a hosting company (rather expensive, mostly dedicated), and he recommended I look at Pair.com… bt that’s just another recommendation…

  
  

• At 09 October '08 - 10:15 dreamhostsux wrote:

  

  DreamHost’s poor customer service has led to a serious privacy invasion. When my client attempted to sign up for an account, the transaction hung halfway through. When customer service (which can only be reached by tedious email exchanges) “fixed” the problem, the pay by credit card option was no longer available. The customer service representative insisted that we use Google Payments. I proceeded, and then my client realized his financial information is now in the Google system. The worst possible scenario then came true. Instead of completing the transaction, Google called my client’s bank for “preapproval”. This was not to complete the transaction (which was never completed), but to gather information for Google’s marketing. My client is furious, reviewing everyone’s privacy policy, and is looking into ways to bring this problem up at the political, and possibly the legal, level.
  
  Throughout this whole situation, Dreamhost has been nothing but pig-headed. Every customer service representative ignores the case history and either refers us back to Google Payments or says patronizing things like we could have paid with the original credit card system. I offered them a solution where I quietly pay for the account using Google transactions, and they won’t even let me help bail them out!!!
  
  I will never refer another client to dreamhost. Right now I’m looking for the best place to air this complaint publicly in as many places as possible. People have to know that when Dreamhost pushes people into using Google Payments, Google then has their financial information to aggregate and deploy for their own purposes.

  
  

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