I’ve been using Dreamhost as my webhost for just over a year now, and I’m generally very, very happy with them. The prices are pretty good, and the features they offer are great and totally easy to use. However, I think I must have at least brief outages of service once a month or so. And every so often I have significant (6+ hour) outages.
This is a pain, especially when it falls on a blog update day like today. This means that I can’t post stuff, which throws me off. It’s not a big deal. I mean, I don’t expect my ‘audience’ to be angry or anything, but often it means that I don’t have a chance to do final edits until Tuesday morning (or later), and thus I don’t look at my Thursday post until Wednesday, which results in some dang crappy posts.
I wonder: is this fairly average for webhosts? Having this many outages? Is it even regular for Dreamhost, or am I just on a crappy shared server that crashes all the time?
Thomas
I actually just bought an account _today_ on Dreamhost in the middle of all their holy hell. Kinda thrilling to see what the future holds.
Anyway, 1 small outage a month is “Still totally unacceptable!!! Six Sigma! … …yet, pretty much the industry standard”. So that’s pretty much everywhere.
The longer downtimes are a little troubling, but if you contrast that with the price you pay, it’s pretty decent.
My other webhost is great, and I had one pretty much all-day outage once in three years (and a 6-hour or more outage maybe once a year, maybe twice), which again is standard for “higher disaster recovery sites”, but I’m paying more for that site.
-Andy
To summarize: For $10 a month for what they give you, Dreamhost seems like a golden fucking egg. If I were paying $20/month or more, or was on their biz plan, I’d definitely have issues with that amount of downtime though (but I expect the service/hosting server would be better too if I were in a higher-tier account).
-Andy
I use surpass hosting and while I’ve heard there are problems, have never run into them myself.
I think I pay $6/month.
I’m with GoDaddy right now, and haven’t had any downtime (that I’ve noticed; I check generally once or twice a day). I don’t remember what I’m paying monthly.. But a quick search, it looks like I’m paying $3.95 a month (for a year-long plan) plus something about.. $9 for a year’s domain registration.
I’m with Dreamhost and have had very little downtime that I’ve noticed. Been there for… whoah… going on 6 years, i guess. About 2 years ago, they suffered a major hack and crash which brought them down for 3 days, but besides that, I could count on one hand the times I’ve seen it go.
Maybe Dreamhost just hates you, ya bastage.
Well, everyone else does, so that would only mean that they’re total conformists. Hear that? Dreamhost is totally influnced by peer pressure!
Thomas