Justin Dupre

Avoid Dreamhost at All Costs

2 Written by Justin Dupre on August 26, 2008 – 11:55 am

This blog is hosted on my first webhost I ever purchased. I was frail, unknowing and ignorant when it came to hosting options, and at the time (around December) I was running on just a few dollars a month. I saw the space Dreamhost offered, and the growing amount of space they give every month. Oooo Shiny, right?

Wrong. At first I had no problems with them. I hosted my first few blogs there, had a few SEO’d sites that got awesome traffic on long tail keywords and direct product matches after just a couple weeks of work, and I registered all my domains with Dreamhost. Hell, this blog is hosted there even now.

Things stayed smoother for a couple months. Then, they were like “FUCK YOU to anyone that signed up with us on a debit card.” They ended charging my debit card with no money on it for 2 years of service. No problem though, as they immediately charged back the money. However, where were my overdraft fees they should have paid for, too? They did nothing and responded to no emails I sent them.

After that, things just sucked. My loading times on trying to get onto the backend of WP are miserable. Sometimes, it even times out. Then there are the times that the server status just cuts out for minutes, even hours and days at a time.

This was especially great when I went to cloak an ad using a redirect for Facebook. As soon as the ad got up and running, and I got to changing the redirection to what I really wanted, the hosting just died. I lost about 50 dollars in clicks until I noticed it. Maybe I’m just on a crap server, and should ask to be moved, but something just says don’t even bother with it.

I’ve read the reviews now, and everyone says Dreamhost is great if you need a shit load of cheap space and don’t actually use it for anything serious. I’d say its great for backing up files, and the hosting space and bandwidth keeps growing on a weekly basis. I’ll still keep my account for those reasons, and those reasons only, but never again will I host on it. It just isn’t reliable.

So, wanting to move away from shared hosting, I bought myself an unmanaged VPS server at Linode. I knew nothing about VPS, seting them up, or Linux, but hydrophonic from the Nicky Cakes Chat hooked me up with everything I needed. The new site I’ll be running some massive PPC campaigns on will be up soon, and I’ll hopefully be doubling my revenue by next month with this thing.

These guys have excellent reviews, and everyone I’ve talked to said they’ve had nearly 100% uptime and most dowtime is actually caused by user mistakes, not the actual servers. I’ll give a better review once I test it out, but I’m hoping it isn’t comparable to Dreamhost as it should be well better.

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