I agree that Google bots consume lot of bandwidth, but I don't think any site can afford the luxury of blocking them. If it is true, this is a suicidal move .
Yeah...the days of $10 mammoth hosting accounts are over...requirements of sites and scripts are increasing...but not dreamhost. VPSs are becoming mainstream and I simply love them.
Plain foolish! i remember one of my sites getting hammered quite hard by numerous yahoo spiders at once, but googlebot is usually pretty reasonable with its crawling. i'd expect dreamhost to lose alot of clients over this
Thats the only way any host can block some ip unless they went into ur account and put some ips on deny list of ur account, which u can ofcourse mannually change , so i think its server wide move. But anyways thats what you get when you go for cheap overselling hosts
Googlebot doesnt uses much bandwidth but it does consumes somewhat greater server load when you are heavily indexed by Google and your site's crawled often!