Well, in light of all the recent mis-haps over at Dreamhost, I’ve moved my domain to another hosting provider. Dreamhost is a great company and I’ve been using them (off and on) since about 1998 when I registered this domain. Remeber NDN? All those great creative websites and ideas (endquote, iDallas, The Fray, et al) I even have an old Fray t-shirt. I really like Dreamhost and what they represent as a hosting provider and the web community. Nevertheless, I decided to pull the plug on Dreamhost and move on.
Believe it or not, but, the downtime and performance issues I was experiencing weren’t the sole reason for me leaving. In fact, I was sitting pretty there at Dreamhost. I had something like 26GB+ disk space (and growing), unlimited everything and was making about $100 a year in rewards which pretty much covered my yearly bill. None of the sites I host there are “critical” so downtime is only an annoyance. But, it was the annoyance that started me looking. Then, I discovered VPS (or VDS or whatever they want to call it). Virtualization. Basically; my own little dedicated system (root access and all). Now I have complete control over my hosting environment. Sure, I lost about half the storage but, I have so much more in terms of flexibility and control, not to mention performance. Part of what you get with a VPS is a certain amount of the host system’s resources (CPU and RAM mostly). I won’t go into the boring details, but this basically translates to much less VPSs per host machine than in a shared hosting environment. Dreamhost was probably hosting around 200 accounts on one webserver. With my current VPS provider, I’m probably sharing a host system with about 20 other people at most. Of course, I haven’t verified that, but, given the technology, the host machine can only handle as many VPSs as it has resources for. i.e. You can’t host 100 128MB VPSs on one machine with 2GB of RAM. It’s not possible… well, it *is* but that’s another topic for another discussion.
I would still highly recommend Dreamhost for someone who is just starting out. Like I said, they are good people and are very up-front with their customers. They own up to their mistakes and keep their clients updated on the latest issues/outtages (if there are any). Plus, you can’t reallyl beat the cost to features aspect. You really do get your money’s worth.
So, so long Dreamhost. It’s been a fun ride. And who knows, maybe I’ll come back one day (I’ve done it in the past). I just wanted to let you know that, it’s not you, it’s me.
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