Dreamhost
Rating: 
The past few days, my websites have been suffering under extreme lengths of downtime and lag. I was getting pretty frustrated and upset since when I wanted to see my website, it would return with a connection error. It didn’t help all that much that the support would reply, “Everything has been fixed now. We hope that you will not experience something like this for a very long time” after a six hour downtime. But then the next day, my websites goes down for another six hours.
I have been a Dreamhost customer for quite a while now. Around March of last year, I started with Dreamhost. I have faced downtimes, but it wasn’t all that bad until summer of 2006. For two weeks, it was downtime after downtime after downtime. I felt like there were more times where I couldn’t access my websites than when I could. Eventually, the problems were resolved and I decided to buy a two-year contract late October of 2006. In retrospect, that was a big mistake.
I faced downtimes a few times every month and after my three-month trial period was over, the support went straight down. I received slow responses and less than stellar replies. As quite a few other people under Dreamhost service have pointed out, it was a back-and-forth game of:
“My websites aren’t working. Please fix this!”
“All your websites seem to be working fine for me!”
“No, it’s not working. I just checked and they aren’t working. See, look.”
“Everything seems to be fine!”
“No, everything is not fine. Look!”
“Oh, there was a little problem. Everything should be resolved now!”
But the times between the replies take up to 24 hours if not more. Such small problems can really be dragged out.
I can’t say that Dreamhost is a terribly bad host. There are worse hosts out there. Dreamhost service is really the luck of the draw. If you’re put on a good server, you will love the service and you would think everything is great. However, if you’re unlucky (such as me), you might get continual downtime and feel like you have been cheated out of your money. The one upside: no matter if you have terrible or great service, you get flexibility. You have shell access and unlike the rigidity of a Cpanel plan, you can set your directories to how you would like them to look.
Sign up wisely. I encourage people to test out Dreamhost, but make sure you use a promo code, such as MAXIMUMOFFER, when signing up. This would cut $97 off of any one-year or two-year contract price, which would allow you to test out their service without feeling extremely cheated if anything becomes terrible.