Comments on: Experiences with Hosting Downtime, Dreamhost, Googlebot, Shell

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:07:52 +0000

Dreamhost PS service sucks for medium sites.

I had a site hosted that averages 1000GB ram usage.

It was down 1-2 hours every day all they can say to have patience and wait.

After migrating me to other PS all stopped working for 2 days because the migration was not complete.

After the tech guy that took 2 days to see what was the problem they put all my user accounts mixed in the same dir erasing and replacing similar filenames.

After correcting that i found out my Private Server has been hosting some other user accounts that wore not mine and using my payed resources.

Problems after problems…

Run from dreamhost PS servers!

For small sites shared hosting is ok though.

If you need a service more stable the recommended links in this forum seem good.
I personally like mediatemple.net.

By: AdamQ

AdamQ — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:20:37 +0000

That Dreamhost acts like that sucks, what about giving customers the benefit of a doubt, or maybe even (shock and horror) pick up the phone and call you! Regarding finding different hosting I recommend taking a look at the web hosting comparison site WebHostNinja.com, it is a good place to find hosting.

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 31 May 2008 05:52:20 +0000

Hello! I found this an interesting read. I actually work in the Tech Support dept. of a webhosting company (Visox.com). We have had to disable a few accounts there is no doubt, but the methods that they used to disable your account were really just warnings.

When we do it, the apache.conf record for your domain(s) is changed, so that the location of your files is moved from /home/username/ to /home/closed/

Is this way, there is no way you can get around your site getting closed, and you will have to take it up with tech support to get it fixed.

It is strange though, that they simply closed your account like that. We almost never have to do that, since when ever the something like this happens, we always identify what the problem is before hand, and recommend solutions to get it fixed. Although I will admit that sometimes we can not determine a specific cause, we still give you time to consider a plan upgrade even if you are over your quota.

We are rather small, we only have about 200 servers, and about 15 of which are running as virtuals with shared hosting. Dreamhost is much larger, so for them its not as much of a priority to identify the cause.

Anyways, I enjoyed reading your article and gaining some insight into the workings of another company.

By: Syahid A.

Syahid A. — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:07:19 +0000

At least their transparent, mine is not like that.

By: Tim Cat

Tim Cat — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:40:24 +0000

Media Temple was always a slow ISP for me although I loved their control panel. I had very much success with myhosting.com. They have a nice community site located at http://portal.myhosting.com. I recommend it…

By: bharat

bharat — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:52:42 +0000

i liked the blog

By: Techblissonline Dot Com

Techblissonline Dot Com — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:00:48 +0000

Why did googlebot hammer only your site on the server? Strange…

btw…sumesh which webhost do you suggest…

By: QuickOnlineTips

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 27 May 2008 05:41:59 +0000

Every web hosting has problems. Some advertise it and say sorry, some cover it up. I find Dreamhost is always transparent about its misadventures.

I have been with Dreamhost for 2 years, and in all that time there has been a max 4-5 days of downtime, most commonly beacuse of Googlebot hammering and disabling a site becomes essential to keep other sites on the server working. We get angry, but it seems fair enough. I still recommend Dreamhost. If you search enough on the web, you can dig up unhappy customers about any web hosting.

I would just wish they had a better ticket response time, just to know someone is looking into the issue. Maybe better weekend support too.

By: Ross

Ross — Tue, 27 May 2008 00:25:23 +0000

Dreamhost has that weird issue with Googlebot. If you need something that can go beyond shared hosting I would look into Slicehost like your readers suggested.

Ross
-http://www.hostdisciple.com

By: Davinder

Davinder — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:04:52 +0000

Managing blogs isn’t easy once they get little bigger. Inspite of downtime, I still feel dreamhost is better among shared hosts. As such no host can afford to keep heavy usage site online and crash number of other sites on the same server.

I was surprised to know, dreamhost offer SSH feature. Usually shared hosts dont offer it. I am also trying to learn SSH – it is a wonderful thing to help you manage site. Thanks for heads up on SSH and dreamhost… time to do some experiments.

Also, if you are looking for dedicated hosting – try [theplanet.com] I have been using it for 3 months now, I works very well!