Webhost recommendation: Dreamhost.com

[cheeni]

I've been using Dreamhost.com and friends who are looking to switch hosting providers have asked me in the past about my experiences with them. When I got an email yet again today I decided that there might be a good reason to publish this information to the world.

First check out the latest plans and offers at http://dreamhost.com, this post doesn't deal with any of this.

Now the recommendation:

Hi srini,

My xxxx is up for renewal. Don't want to continue (too much downtime, and 
i end up telling them that the server is down!). How is dreamhost working out? 
SSH ok? MySQL ok? 

Dreamhost works fine for me. They provide a lot for the price, and since I am not running anything mission critical, it seems ok.

There is some downtime since there are a lot of users, and DH is good but not really looking to deliver 9s, everything is only best effort. I have reported mail / www / mailman outages, but I'm usually not the first person reporting it, and they are usually already working on it. Outages have rarely been greater than a few hours. You can report an outage on the webpanel and it will tell you when it was first reported, when it was confirmed and so on.

This is the most automated webhost I have ever been at, this is a lot of power, and you tend to get used to it. Creating a sub-domain, upgrading the version of PHP, creating a new mailing list, editing DNS records, everything works off the web panel and gets done in minutes. Much better than emailing a helpdesk every time you need to do something.

Whenever I've needed human support, they have always responded in 24-48 hours, even on weekends. System loads are fine, and the servers are not really slow. Of course I have never thrown anything that challenging at cheeni.net so I wouldn't really know, it works for me.

The current load average for the server that runs cheeni.net is

22:57:02 up 55 days, 20:44,  2 users,  load average: 2.35, 2.61, 2.86

$cat /proc/cpuinfo
[...]
model name      : Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 175
cache size      : 1024 KB

$cat /proc/meminfo
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  4172861440 4035751936 137109504        0  8925184 2341986304
Swap: 6465036288 1043316736 5421719552
MemTotal:      4075060 kB
MemFree:        133896 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:          8716 kB
Cached:        2263292 kB
SwapCached:      23804 kB
Active:         734012 kB
Inactive:      1562204 kB
HighTotal:     3211200 kB
HighFree:         5464 kB
LowTotal:       863860 kB
LowFree:        128432 kB
SwapTotal:     6313512 kB
SwapFree:      5294648 kB

The servers are definitely not under utilized, but it's good enough for most.

> Let me know. If you get referral credit,
> let me know what i have to do to get you credit.

Dreamhost will from time to time release promo codes of their own that are usually the best deal. For example, I used promo code 777 that got me a year's service for < $10. This code may not be active anymore but I am sure you can find something reasonably good from DH or on Google. Using this promo will eliminate any referrals, which is ok as long as you are getting a good deal.

If you don't find anything that gives you at least $97 off, then contact me and I can make you a promo code that gives you up to $97 off.

If you'd like to refer me, you can do so in one of these ways.

Click http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?191832 and then sign up, like so

1. Enter that cheeni AT (s/AT/@/) gmail.com referred you when you sign up.
OR,
2. Use a promo code that I created for you when signing up.

If you don't use any promo codes, and refer me by citing my email address then I get $97 after their 97 day cancellation window has expired.

Hope this helps!

< / END OF RECOMMENDATION >

UPDATED:
P.S. thaths,jace,brainz and ravi are Dreamhost customers too.

Comments

[hserus.livejournal.com]

Go for it. Will Yardley at Dreamhost is an old acquaintance and he's one of the more clued webhosts out there.

[brainz.livejournal.com]

I'm one too and i dont do any mission critical stuff, i use it to house some videos/comics/books/email and some moozik, ofcourse password protected. ;)

Service is good, once my webmail conked, i couldn't login, after filing a complaint, they fixed it within 12 hours. POP was working fine, so i could check my mail using 3rd party service like mail2web.com

The only grouch I have against them is that they wont let you run a persistent background process, so you cant run irc/p2p using screen.

Its worth the price if you are a new signup, not really sure if you want to renew again.

[sriniram.livejournal.com]

I've used screen and left processes running, like for example a wget of a very large list of small files.

They use / used to use GNU CPU accounting utilities and prevent a user from utlizing more than 60 minutes of CPU a day across www/mail/wget. I remember they went ahead and removed that restriction too after many folks complained a while back. You may want to check on this.

[sriniram.livejournal.com]

For anyone interested in CPU accounting, the GNU Accounting Manual makes interesting reading. It's also got tasty nuggest of *nix history

Way back a long time ago, Thompson and Ritchie were sitting opposite one another at the commissary, sipping coffees and discussing their evolving behemoth.

“This behemoth of ours,” said Ken, “is becoming rather popular, wouldn't you say?” “Yes,” said Dennis. “Every time I want to do a compilation, I have to wait for hours and hours. It's infuriating.” They both agreed that the load on their system was too great. Both sighed, picked up their mugs, and went back to the workbench. Little did they know that an upper-management type was sitting just within earshot of their conversation.

“We are AT&T Bell Laboratories, aren't we?” the upper-management type thought to himself. “Well, what is our organization best known for?” The brill-cream in his hair glistened. “Screwing people out of lots of money, of course! If there were some way that we could keep tabs on users and charge them through the nose for their CPU time...”

The accounting utilities were born.

Extract from: http://www.gnu.org/software/acct/manual/html_node/Preface.html

your promo code :)

[(Anonymous)]

Hey I noticed that you aren't using the new method of referral links to improve your dreamhost referrals

Mr. apache
@ http://www.askapache.com/2007/dreamhost/multiply-your-dreamhost-referrals.html