I’m thinking of moving…

Rich Pav General

Dreamhost offers a ridiculously insane amount of services for a very low price, but continuous problems with their infrastructure (network outages, failures caused by a lack of redundant hardware) are making me seriously consider moving to another host. Are there any other hosts out there who offer:

  • unlimited subdomains, or at least more than I could ever use
  • bandwidth and disk space out the wazoo
  • shell access
  • phpMyAdmin
  • great customer service
  • few, if any, outages caused by backhoes, someone tripping over a power cord, or hardware failures

Rich Pav

Richard has been living in Japan since 1990 with his wife and two teenage sons, Tony and Andy.

13 thoughts to “I’m thinking of moving…”

  1. You might take a look at the Grid-Service offerings from mediatemple:
    http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/

    It has a great admin interface and my experience with the customer service so far has been pretty good. Maybe a little more expensive than DreamHost, but $20 for grid auto-scaling and reliability is pretty amazing.

    I am not sure how much access you need as far as root shell and installing extra daemons and stuff vs. what they can accomodate (given the grid nature), so that might be something to investigate before signing up.

  2. @Brian: Thanks, that looks like a very good host for us to use at work. They have everything we’re looking for. For me personally though, it seems a little too expensive.

  3. I personally find mediatemple’s grid-service to be excellent hosting. While I don’t host my main site on it, I’ve had a site hosted on mediatemple survive digg.com/reddit.com frontpage linkage without downtime. Dreamhost sites simply cannot survive such traffic. I’ve also found mediatemple’s overall uptime and speed to be far superior to dreamhost.

  4. @James: I wonder if slashdotted (what’s the modern term?) Dreamhost sites go down more often because people don’t use the WP-cache plugin.

    For me $240/year is a lot for hosting. I’ve only made about $9 from ad banners so far…

  5. Rich:

    While I’ve had wordpress blogs with WP-cache installed crash on several occasions under heavy traffic from the “digg effect.” Dreamhost also likes to place temporary limits on the number of visitors a high traffic site can get.

    If you aren’t making much with those google ads, I’d suggest you move them to the very top of your right column. It might be unsightly, but it will at least put the ads within view of visitors.

  6. I am very happy with resellershosting.net (or techark.com for non reseller account).

    They have been around since the late nineties. I use them since 2002 without any complaint.

    I am not sure if it’s in your price range, but service wise it’s a great value.

  7. If you are really wanting cheap with tons of storage and low cost bandwidth, and you are comfortable admin’ing your own Linux box, then maybe even check out Amazon’s EC2.

    I don’t know how easy it would be to handle a digg traffic spike as far as having it automatically create new clones to load balance to, but you could probably add a couple more yourself if you wanted without must cost increase.

    I don’t have personal experience with it, though, to provide any further insight.

  8. Check out site5.com. $5/mo gets you 110gb of storage and 5tb of transfer! You have to sign up for 2 years to get that price, but I think that knocks the socks off what I’ve seen anywhere else.

  12. Hey Rich! I’ve been checking out your podcast for awhile, but for some reason didn’t realize you also had a blog until recently. Anycrap, I have Dreamhost too, but have been with other hosts before and I’m actually going to stick it out with DH unless something catastrophic happens. In my experience, other hosts are much worse about communicating with customers when something is down and to me that kind of customer service is priceless. They also seem to include a LOT more than other hosts for the price you pay. I think the only way DH’s downtime would be unacceptable is if I was trying to run a business website, but even then I’d have dedicated hosting if it was something that needed to be up 24-7.

    However, if you are hell-bent on leaving, I’ve heard nothing but good things about MediaTemple http://www.mediatemple.net/

    Hope this helps!

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