Why I Almost Love DreamHost
Jens Meiert, March 13, 2007 / March 7, 2008.
This entry is filed under User Experience.
I almost love web hosting provider DreamHost. Right. I do appreciate it from a professional point of view since DreamHost does several things “more than right” so that it generally provides a great user experience.
How’s that? Basically, because DreamHost
- is relatively low-priced (taking all features into account, German provider 1&1 is about 200 times (!) more expensive than DreamHost – even their nuclear weapon safe computer center doesn’t help anymore);
- removes all worries concerning both storage and bandwidth (both start with enough GB/TB that are also increased on a weekly basis);
- provides many features (and as a web professional, you always love that anyway) – that doesn’t mean the usual stuff (email, hooray …), but rather Ruby on Rails, CVS/Subversion, and streaming support, and also WebDAV, chat services (Jabber, if you like it), and shell access, for example.
However, the most important point is the disk storage and bandwidth aspect. On the one hand, that is still a problem when it comes to other providers and DreamHost solves that once and for all (if not, you must be a very successful site owner). On the other hand, it’s solved very interestedly by weekly bonuses. These bonuses play an important part in the overall experience since they make you “feel more safe” and they also mean completely new possibilities. (For example, it finally allowed me to outsource all my project stuff – I just dropped the local CVS setup, created an SVN repository, and don’t need to worry that there’s not enough webspace. Why should I.)
Figure: Ancient screenshot of DreamHost’s “Disk” and “Xfer” display.
Right, I’m a happy customer. And I’m a happy customer even though there is one important thing that bothers me: Uptime could be much better. (Monitoring my sites with Montastic reveals more breakdowns with DreamHost than with my local provider.) Well, I hope that DreamHost will manage that as well. Meanwhile I’m talking positively about them (there’s nothing more effective than word-of-mouth recommendation, right) and actually recommend some products. That is what I really love the most – that I don’t need to complain about DreamHost, that it works fine. There’s enough complaining, legitimate complaining, and I’m sick of it.
So please take that as a post with professional intentions, and not as “yet another advertising crap”. But I certainly won’t hinder you if you liked to try Dreamhost (promo code “j9t” will bring you “1 extra free lifetime domain registration”). Yah, that doesn’t even make me look bad and evil and whatever since this is supposed to be useful for you, too. It’s yet another thing that DreamHost does right.
(Promise, there’s a serious rant again in the next post.)
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Comments
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On March 14, 2007, 14:00 CET, Eric said:
I 100% agree. Although in addition to uptime, I’d have to say their overall data transfer speed could be way better. Sometimes my site takes 20+ seconds to load.
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On March 14, 2007, 16:13 CET, Bernhard said:
Wow, wow, wow!
Did I get it right? After one year using “Crazy Domain Insane!” you have about 220 GB of disk storage?
And Rails support for this little money? Why are they so cheap??? Why?
Isn’t there anything like a “Pferdefuß”?
And why didn’t you tell us before?
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On March 14, 2007, 16:43 CET, Bernhard said:
These both blog entries and the comment of Eric shocked me a little bit.
So, it seems to be great for testing and personal presentation but for commercial websites (even very small ones) these long downtimes can’t be accepted.
And I just thought and found some Rails support at an affordable price so that I don’t have to care about my virtual server any longer …
Or am I wrong? -
On March 14, 2007, 16:50 CET, Jens Meiert said:
Yes, uptime’s sometimes an issue … But I experienced no really long downtime periods, though (and fortunately).
If you want to see for yourself, monitor for example WHWS (DreamHost hosted, unlike this site) via Montastic.
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On March 14, 2007, 17:33 CET, medyk said:
I wonder how many of you really use that hundreds GB’s of disk space or TB’s of transfer (?)
To me they’re just marketing catch and unfortunately (up to my experiences) the uptime and speed experienced on their servers is below average. Many other host provide much more balanced service in that case for similar price.I think best advantage of Dreamhost is possibilities you have on shared server.. like building your own compilation of PHP I don’t know any other host that will allow that.
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On March 17, 2007, 13:16 CET, Jens Meiert said:
medyk, it’s right that you’ll hardly use all that stuff, but this is exactly what makes worries disappear. (I know other providers where I’d need to pay for bandwidth yet for this very site.)
And the sheer amount of webspace and bandwidth enables other options … for example setting up online SVN/CVS, or a nice streaming server …
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On August 19, 2007, 14:46 CEST, Web Hosting in Australia said:
I’ve used DreamHost for a few of my clients and I have always found the servers to be big on features (very important) but slow on speed. I think they cram so many web sites on their servers that it slows them right down
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On December 12, 2007, 23:01 CET, Jens Meiert said:
Update: Promo code “j9tplus” offers even more webspace as well as $20 savings.
(Playing around with DreamHost promos.)
