My God Dreamhost Sucks! Biggest Newbie Mistake Going With Them

[Spliffic]

Man I hate dreamhost. Obviously I should have went dedicated but when I signed up I thought that shared hosting would be okay and that it wouldn't be a big deal. I am also a newbie so I didn't want to go and spend a whole lot on hosting as I have a very limited budget. Man was I ever wrong.

Almost every second day there is a major outage, where pages fail to load or I am sitting for like 10 mins before something comes up. What pisses me off most is that I'm paying for adwords to display my website, and when people click the link to my site and it doesn't popup within the first 3-5 seconds, I've lost a potential customer. So I'm losing in more ways than just the stupid fees I'm paying for hosting.

I might have to bite the bullet and ditch them even though I paid for a year's worth of subscription. It just gets my blood boiling thinking about how crappy their hosting is. :mad: I paid via paypal for hosting so there is no chance of a refund, man what a mistake that was...

[FredRoe]

You gotta try HostGator, only $7.95 a month, and well worth it. I have been with them over two years, and I don't think I've noticed my sites ever go down.

[Spliffic]

Thanks, I wish I would have known this a month ago :p Will look into this, just need to rant about how much DH sucks!

[cooldude7273]

You're more likely to get reliable service and personal attention if go with a smaller company than with a megacompany like Dreamhost.

I can hook you up with the best hosting of your life for as low as $3.95 if you'd like. ;)

[live-cms_com]

I have notices no problems what-so-ever with DreamHost, it's had like 1 day of downtime in the 6 months I've been using it. I use 10GB transfer per day and have had no problems.

[cooldude7273]

I have notices no problems what-so-ever with DreamHost, it's had like 1 day of downtime in the 6 months I've been using it. I use 10GB transfer per day and have had no problems.

Yeah, but DreamHost also has hundreds of servers. You're simply on one of the more fortunate reliable servers while it seems Spliffic got stuck with a bad server. Your experience with a host can depend greatly on the server you are put on.

[blin100]

You can always request dreamhost to move your site to a new server. i was having horrible issues and i asked them nicely to transfer it and now, i get (from a uptime site) atmost 4 total minutes of downtime a month :P

[DomainCo.US]

i am ok with their service, can be improved though...

[jsb]

I would also ask them to move your site to another server. I had similar issues with another host, made them move my site, all is well again. It took more than a nice "please move my site to another server webhosting guy", so be prepared.

[mrgee]

I've been using DreamHost for more than a month now, and it is great. I have never experienced downtime on my sites for now.

I've used HostGator before that since I heard a lot about it, but I was extremely disapointed by their service. I have asked the HostGator support if image hosting site is allowed, even though it says that it is not in the TOS, I just wanted to be sure if it is allowed anyway if I disable hotlinking to full size images on the image hosting site. The live chat man told it was ok, but a few days later I was suspended with the reason that I have broke the TOS and I had to exchange a few kind but hard emails with them to be eligable for a refund. Then I decided to not use them anymore, I have switched to DreamHost and I am thinking to stick with them since everything works fine...

PS: Use my second sig link for $50 off your order if you are thinking to order hosting from DreamHost.

[cooldude7273]

I personally don't think you should have to ask to get moved to a better server. Should not ALL their servers be reliable and not just some?

(Perhaps this is my customer-centric mind on drugs?)

[digitalmatch]

Have you paid for 6 months or one year in advance? Is the quality any different when you use different browsers?

[jsb]

Yes all the servers should be reliable in a perfect world. Still if moving to another server is a option I'd take it. It worked for me. If you work with computers you know how some machines just give trouble over and over again.

[funtimes07]

I've been using DreamHost for more than a month now, and it is great. I have never experienced downtime on my sites for now.

I've used HostGator before that since I heard a lot about it, but I was extremely disapointed by their service. I have asked the HostGator support if image hosting site is allowed, even though it says that it is not in the TOS, I just wanted to be sure if it is allowed anyway if I disable hotlinking to full size images on the image hosting site. The live chat man told it was ok, but a few days later I was suspended with the reason that I have broke the TOS and I had to exchange a few kind but hard emails with them to be eligable for a refund. Then I decided to not use them anymore, I have switched to DreamHost and I am thinking to stick with them since everything works fine...

PS: Use my second sig link for $50 off your order if you are thinking to order hosting from DreamHost.

This is true man, and this was my exact answer to everyone who hated dreamhost....

One day they disabled my cronjobs, and told me i would need to find a different host. Now, i stayed with dreamhost because i honestly liked them, but after they told me it would take them months to get me onto a VPS i was upset.

I had to move all my databases to a1 webhosting, wich is awesome, got my own VPS for 59.99% , great bandwith, and the C.S. is amazing....hes litterally helping me move my entire network for free....and he actually will talk to you and reply to emails.

So yes dreamhost is a good host for static pages, but if your site will cause spikes in loads on the cpu, etc...dreamhost will stop you...

you get what you pay for...

Dreamhost (virtual)
7.95$ = 500GB Bandwith.....

A1 (VPS)
59.99$ = 400GB

If u look, at first of course your going to go with dreamhost, but think about it, how are they offering so cheap, because they will stop certain sites when the loads are too demanding, and since they are cheap they get abused....

remember, we make a living off the sites, so having a good "rental space" is key.

[blin100]

well, agreed, theoretically, all the servers would be the same. However...this is shared hosting. If one of the sites hosted on your server gets dugg...your site gets affected too. If their site is just a resource whore, but isn't at the point where dreamhost yells at them, your performance goes down too. Moving a server where its real bad provides you an *opportunity* of getting into a better one. sure, they should load balance them, but the thing is, most customers keep their mouthes shut. If no one says anything, or a select few, they won't go through the trouble of doing that :P

And yea, you do get what you pay for. If you check all the posts on the status blog for dreamhost, people are whining about loosing thousands in revenue. Well....if you get thousands of dollars in revenue, i think you could have been smart and got a private server instead of shared hosting...you aren't going to put mission critical website or sql servers on hosted servers exactly because of this point :P

[ninjashoes]

I remember having a ton of downtime with them, they have so many servers to worry about.

[JohnS0N]

I use dreamhost since years and have no issues with them. There is an outage once or twice a month for a couple of minutes, but you would get that with every hosting company. Their features are incomparable. You can transfer unlimited domains for free, bandwith and diskspace is HUGE compared to others. At the beginning I didn't like their "home-made" cpanel, but after you get used to it you're gonna love it.

[ssrulz1]

I have a reseller account with sambahosting, and their support is top-notch. I would suggest you to give them a try. I have lots of bad experience with other hosts.

[pilotX]

Yeah, I personally think dream-host is lame, Hostgator is the way to go, I rarely have hosting issues and they have good support .As for dream-host I have an account that I use for some blogging and video syndicating and I've had tons of problems, not to mention they accidentally ran a billing cycle that charged me a ton of money and over-drafted my account. I was one of a few hundred dream-host members billed randomly. It took over a month to get my money refunded.

[pbhosting]

Man I hate dreamhost. Obviously I should have went dedicated but when I signed up I thought that shared hosting would be okay and that it wouldn't be a big deal. I am also a newbie so I didn't want to go and spend a whole lot on hosting as I have a very limited budget. Man was I ever wrong.

Almost every second day there is a major outage, where pages fail to load or I am sitting for like 10 mins before something comes up. What pisses me off most is that I'm paying for adwords to display my website, and when people click the link to my site and it doesn't popup within the first 3-5 seconds, I've lost a potential customer. So I'm losing in more ways than just the stupid fees I'm paying for hosting.

I might have to bite the bullet and ditch them even though I paid for a year's worth of subscription. It just gets my blood boiling thinking about how crappy their hosting is. :mad: I paid via paypal for hosting so there is no chance of a refund, man what a mistake that was...

i had the same problem with 1 and 1. TERRIBLE customer support, their control panel SUCKS. and if u try to transfer a domain they get pissy and try to stop u. i moved three domains away from them because i had finally had enough. signed up for 2 years, finally got fed up after a year. so i started my own hosting company and left that headache behind. probably the best thing i could have done. cuz if theres an outage, i have just one person to scream at, well ok two, me and my sysadmin. instead of calling some 800 number to talk to people who can BARELY speak english!!

plus it gives me complete control over my business and servers, which is totally great :)

i would suggest getting away from dreamhost and AVOID 1 AND 1 like the plague. ex of how bad 1 and 1 is, i have some domains with namecheap.com and 1 and 1. im in the process moving domains from 1 and 1 to namecheap.com. 1 and 1 takes up to 48 hours to get a dns change done. 48 HOURS! i make a dns change with namecheap, and its done within MINUTES, not hours, and its already populated in the usa in about 30-60 minutes. 1 and 1, yeah change ur dns then go on vaction cuz they have to wait for germany to send the updates out, the usa office doesnt do them.

just fyi.
James

[1mak]

i recommend hostgator, i am with them for years.


dont forget to claim a discount when signing up. eg hostgator coupon-code hostingtops to get $9.94 off (http://www.hostingtops.com/affordable-hostgator-review.php)

[developr]

I was about to go with Hostgator about a month ago and even now I think they are probably the best megahosts. IMHO, you should not be tempted with hosts that offer TBs of bandwidth and storage for ~$5 per month. They cannot really provide you with that, and in the off chance that you actually need it, you will end up going over CPU/RAM/MySQL Connections and they will just disable your website.

Look at your sites and see what you really need. You can always upgrade later. 99% of the hosts out there all have the same basic features, so find a reliable one with a good repuation and try it out. Most offer 30 day guarrantees, so nothing lost.

I read 100's of reviews at Web Hosting Talk and although Hostgator gets lots of good reviews, there were still enough bad reviews to scare me off. I ended up having to decide between http://steadfast.net/ and http://www.downtownhost.com/ which are two of the most hightly respected I could find. Steadfast was the fastest, but their prices were a bit high for me for what you get. Downtown Host has been great so far and half the time when you use their live chat, you end up talking the owner. Pricing is great and they have a 20% off coupon. You can check the link in my signature as that domain is hosted there.

[seodiscovery]

yes dreamhost is hosting u should keep away off, their hosting support is the most lousiest and stupidest of all, i have my blog cannot be post and their support cannot do anything just ask some simple basic question just to make me furious anger, keep away from dreamhost!!! and one more hosting is hostgator, after run about 6 month with their shared hosting they plan to shut off my rsstoblog script capability ,when i ask why they simply ask me to switch to more expensive 100 dollar a month reseller package, DAMN HOSTGATOR!!! , another host u should keep away off, if u want reliable and not cheat communist host just go to globat 4.44 dollar a month

[Erthy]

if u want reliable and not cheat communist host just go to globat 4.44 dollar a month

It's a bit ridiculous to bring politics into it.

I have been using IX for about 3 years. They schedule downtime at midnight and tell you well in advance, however, this has only happened twice, and I never even noticed my site go down (and I check them everyday).

[Loskas]

Do the wisest decision of the year and register with Hostgator. Dreamhost sucks.
http://aff.freeanimesource.com/my-image3.jpg/

[nethelp]

I will never accept something else than HostGator and 1and1!

[jon32000]

i personally like dreamhost only had a couple problems but i sent a support ticket and they fixed it
for the cost you cant really complain you want better service pay more

[ThatDataGuy]

i get 2000mb bandwidth for $1 per month at 1dollar-webhosting.com

it has a great cpanel, and it loads pretty quick.

this is the site i use it with.

fxtradetoday.com

[Dreads]

hostgator isnt that great either...

YOU SHOULD STOP BUYING from oversellers (Companies that sell more then they have to offer)

I am using MountedWeb.com
http://www.mountedweb.com/ <
I personally have had 100% uptime.

I believe its the best hosting out there

[twistedspikes]

Dreamhost has been fine for me while i've used it...:/
Don't think i'll be switching soon anyway.

[VimF]

Dreamhost was down for more than 12 hours yesterday, all sites in my acc there were down, no email, no web, no panel... and this was the second time of this month (previous was about 2 hours or so).

But I don't think I'll move those sites away from DH soon since they eat around 25-30GB a day in average, with 100GB peaks.
And a dedi would be a waste in my case.

[RectangleMan]

2 years on dreamhost and never been any substantial problems

But I don't think I'll move those sites away from DH soon since they eat around 25-30GB a day in average, with 100GB peaks.
And a dedi would be a waste in my case.

For the price you are getting a very good deal imho

[bertamus11]

I have all of my sites hosted at Dreamhost (shared hosting - check my sig).

Now, granted, my sites are not hugely popular but a couple of them get quite a few visitors and page views a day which I am sure spikes the CPU here and there and Dreamhost has never complained about it once. (Knock on wood). Also, in my opinion, their customer support is good. They always resond ASAP and fix any problems I may be experiencing in a timely manner. My sites have gone down twice but not for very long and I'm sure one of those times was my fault.

My only complaint with their customer service is that they won't do things for you like install FFMPEG, a custom PHP.ini and stuff like that. I had to learn to do all of this myself, but now I am happy I learned it. (At the time I wasn't though!)

Anyways, everyone is going to have and is allowed their own opinion(s). Mine is that unless something major happens, I'll be sticking with Dreamhost.

[Loskas]

Hmm.. I guess you guys are lucky then. =P
http://aff.freeanimesource.com/my-image3.jpg

[pilotX]

has anyone heard of slice host. Im not sure exactly how it works but it looks interesting

[blin100]

my god people :P
First, with dreamhost: They have absolutely awesome support. I dont know what you people are filling out in the support form, but when I fill out the necessary info, and select the right severity, I get a response within 4 hours almost every time. And, their downtime hasn't been that bad recently. One other thing I want to point out, their status blog. Has ANYONE ever had a hoster tell you as much info about what went wrong behind the scene than dreamhost? Your hoster might have awesome uptime, and then one day have 2 days of just blackout. Do they ever tell you why? No, of course not.
For 1and1...i've personally had bad problems when I was transferring a domain away from them, but to be honest, their a good host unless you hit some wierd circumstance like i did.

[gunners]

hostgator is cool and if you need some discount contact me

[seodiscovery]

this is great! my problem with hostgator have been solved within second! i can now use my rsstoblog script on my hosting, maybe i have been very bad in doing remarks im sry i pull back my words, 2 thumbs up for hostgator, u are the best and never let me down, thank you

[dzdrazil]

anyone try 000freewebhost.com? i've heard good things there, and using your own domain seems pretty easy, but the small site i was working on for awhile hasn't gone up yet (low priority for me)

[pipes]

One thing ive noticed about hosts is one company can be fine for one customer and a nightmare for another, im with hostgator, some people love them some hate them.

I also use godaddy for hosting, again loads of people say avoid godaddy for hosting, others get along fine with them.

Same with registrars, some love godaddy, others will only use namecheap, and others use all those other popular ones.

Sorry to hear of your problems with dreamhost, before i went with hostgator i spent days researching hosts, god it was overwhelming, i reached the point i had to just go for one finally, i had prices and features and pros and cons coming out my ears, lol

Also remember when you ever look for recommendations that rival companies will of course knock each others services and say that each other are terrible.

[pilotX]

anyone try 000freewebhost.com? i've heard good things there, and using your own domain seems pretty easy, but the small site i was working on for awhile hasn't gone up yet (low priority for me)

Yeah I don't know about freewebhost dzdrazil, looks shady, I bet you would have to put some ugly banner on your header or something..

[supernoobice]

Feel for you buddy. I also experienced that with Dreamhost. I'm with Hostgator for a year now with no problem so far.

[Loskas]

Only bad thing in Hostgator is that their email-support takes so long. Thank god for the live chat -support.
http://www.squidooincome.com/my-image3.jpg

[dzdrazil]

Yeah I don't know about freewebhost dzdrazil, looks shady, I bet you would have to put some ugly banner on your header or something..

eh, well... they *are* free, so i suppose trying can't hurt, right? you'll probably hear from me somewhere on here if it goes well or poorly :cool:

[Spliffic]

Wow I forgot I created this thread as it's been month now, lots of updates! Thanks for the input. I will give my update with Dreamhost for the month.

IT IS A FRIGGIN NIGHTMARE! Every Night I experience HUGE lag, like 5 mins to load a simple webpage. F'king ridiculous, as a newb I didn't realize you can switch servers to improve performance (duh) so I just wrote an email through their sales page to ask them to switch. And NO I'm not exaggerating about every night!

Oh you are probably wondering why did I submit my support ticket through their sales page? BECAUSE THE F'in SUPPORT LINK IS DISABLED. When they have an outage, they create a bulletin with the status update (last update was 2 days ago) and they disable the link to raise a support ticket. How F'kin retarded is that? I was so stupid to pay a whole year for their crap service, if moving servers doesn't improve then I may have to walk away from them and go with someone else.

[Spliffic]

So I am moving to a new server but they cannot do it for another couple days.

Tonight I just tried loading one of my sites, waited 10 mins until I got a 500 Internal Server Error. F%$cking so bloody frustrating. I may need to bite the bullet and move to somewhere else, we'll see how it is after the move.

When they say "you get what you pay for", this is not what I paid for. It's like registering for phone service or hydro and only getting to use it 60% of the time and can cut out at any time. I don't expect 100% uptime or that kind of quality, but every friggen night with timeouts etc is just ridiculous.

My question is, is it difficult to move all your files and stuff (like mydb etc) to another host? I've never exported a mydb database from one host to another, let alone move my other files. Anyone have any tips?

[Spliffic]

Oh ya here's the bulletin they have displayed on their site (where they display this and disable the contact support link as they don't want to get bombarded with complaints). Notice the 5 days 9 hours ago BS...

We're currently experiencing problems with the blingy cluster affecting web, mysql and mail services. The file server is being worked on, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you.

Note: We are doing emergency data moves to quell the stem of problems recently caused by your file server. During these moves, your data may be inaccessible. We are moving as we can off as fast as possible. Very sorry about the continued inconvenience!

Note: We are requesting that customers on the problematic file server limit their data uploads as much as possible (the less data being added the faster we can trim it down and return everything to normal). Thank you for your help!

You can keep updated at dreamhoststatus.com! (posted 5 days 9 hours ago)

[ultradesign]

I use right now hostgator and works fine for me i had no troubles with it. You should try it and swich your domain to it :) I don't think they are recommended for dedicated servers, from what i've heared softlayer.com & theplanet.com are the best. Wish you the best !

[blin100]

spliffic, moving hosts really isn't that difficult.
3 Things need to be moved: Files, databases, and domain (also some maillists or other little things you have installed from dreamhost)
Files....simple
Databases, since you have dreamhost, you go goodies>manage sql>go to the web management, sign in, and you should see an "Export" button. Use that and back that up on your local machine.
Finally, domains...is handled at your new host, they may or may not want an auth code, which is located under Reg Transfer under domains.
Hope it goes off without a hitch :)

[Spliffic]

Thanks guys for your answers and encouragement. DH moved me to another server and so far it's bearable. I may need to move everything in the future though, we'll see how this goes.

[MMandYOu]

They do suck, my blog is on dreamhost and its always slow or offline. I love going to http://www.dreamhoststatus.com and see peoples comments. Is hilarious.

[kenho]

yes they aren't very good......especially if you want to use many php functions as they restrict many things. Even remote url_fopen is disabled.

[Thamelas]

I use Godaddy for hosting. I have never had any problems what so ever.

[deathshadow]

Dreamhost is a case of 'you get what you pay for' - ANY of the sub $10 hosting plans totally suck - usually for one simple clause:

CPU use.

Early on when I was doing websites I was bitten time and time again by shared hosting plans promising absurd bandwidth limits - like dreamhost - but if you even TOUCH the cpu for anything you instantly get kicked, they keep anything you prepayed and they don't even have the courtesy to let you recover any information off the server (sometimes they'll just blanket delete the whole account)

I had a website that was barely using 90 gigs a month transfer that got kicked off of one of dreamhosts now-defunct 'spinoffs' (that was supposed to be for business sites only) - account deleted, data deleted (including all forum posts) with no prior warning... Why? Because the forums would peak to using 14% of the CPU during THEIR AUTOMATED BACKUP.

Unless you are only using it for flat data transfer, there is NO WAY IN HELL you could actually use that 5tb of bandwidth without being kicked off their servers for hogging the server. It's that simple. Read the terms of service:
"If your processes are adversely affecting server performance disproportionately DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the offending processes."

Their current slogan - ten years of dreams is quite apt... because what they offer is a dream, not reality.

Again, you get what you pay for... and what I'm paying for today is a dedicated server.

[Stomme poes]

Ah say, now, ah say, boy, that there's a straight true avatar now! What was it, "You can't get heah from theah"? Ah say, that's a joke son.

[Saeros]

I have been with DreamHost for over 2 years. I have 20+ sites. I have never had any trouble that a quick message to support didn't fix. I have tried others and I still recommend DreamHost.

PS if anybody wants a $50 promo code for signup >> DREAMHOST4WP50

Saeros

[demonator09]

u can ask them for support

[THX2]

Go with hostgator :)

[dbbrock1]

I think someone hit the nail on the head when they said you can get better service from a smaller host. Reason being is because they dont have 50,000 customers so they are less likely to skip your ticket and know they need you. To a big host you are just another number.

But if uptime is really important to you, you should be going somewhere like rackspace.com. It will cost you though

[kenho]

lunarpages.com is pretty good. Powervps.com too, if you're looking for fairly cheap vps systems with functionality of dedicated servers :)