After 4 years ... I'm saying Goodbye to Dreamhost

It's sad to leave Dreamhost, it was good for the past 4 years and I've to be thankful for the good service and smooth sailing of my two sites. I will miss the 10 pages monthly newsletters and how good the control panel is.

The reason I'm leaving is not cost even tho many webhosting companies out there are offering pretty good deal beyond the first year w/ Dreamhost promos. It is a pain to move all your stuff after 4 years, thankfully I'm technical enough to know how to migrate all the data and make proper changes to all the config files.

I have 2 main sites, one e-commerce and one hobby site with an average 400 users/day total. For the past 4 months, there is nothing but problems w/ Dreamhost. First, the load average on the box spikes to the 20-60+ range, causing my sites to come a halt, my average 503 errors is at 25%-27% !! I opened a ticket, got looked at, saying it back to normal, then it spikes up again, after 3-4 tickets, I asked to move to a new box. The load went down to 2-3 on the new box, however, now there are DB overload issues. The connections kept timeout and I don't have access to the DBs to see how overloaded they are.

I opened a few tickets, some got answered within 24 hours, some sits there for 2-3 days. All I got is the DB looks normal and my sites is back to normal. It is not ! For the past 2-3 months, my 503 errors is sitting between 14%-25%, which is unacceptable. I lost a few customers because by site was slow or unresponsive. You may have to setup your own web logs cruncher, I use the free awstats running from cron everynight to see those stats.

So reluctantly, I frantically look for a new hosting company. I don't need a gazillion of bandwidth and disks. I just need a host who can serve 400 users a day in a reliable way. I don't have enough traffic to justify a VPS or dedicated server. I just need to serve 15 requests an hour for my two sites, nothing fancy, I didn't ask for much to be happy.

Dreamhost just over promise and under-deliver. Those extra bandwidth, disks I get every month is nothing if you can't get anything out of it. Loosing 15%+ of your traffic is huge when you only have a few hundreds a day. I hope Dreamhost will put all of those porn sites on a single 386 box and let them enjoy their slow & extended orgasms.

It was a fun ride. I wish you all the best at Dreamhost.

-N

dreamhost is rubbish!!!

What server or cluster were you on?

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It is sad to see that happening. My advice will be that, sometimes, stability goes up together with monthly fee. It looks like your site has attracted good number of visitors. Time for you to invest more on hosting.

I used to be on chiclet where it was overloaded, the moved to fudge. My DB is snowdrop I believe.

My two sites has an average of 400 users on a good day, but mostly between 300-350. So it only has to serve 15 requests an hour or 1 request every 4 minutes, mostly browsing cached pages. I do not consider it a good number by any means. Yet 15% of those requests dropped in the last 3-4 months, the worse peak was 25% two months ago.

I don't ask for much of cheap hosting. I paid $10/month, all I need is 1Gig of disk space and 10 Gig of bandwidth and I expect it to be available 99.9%, not 80% of time. The practice of over-promise and under-deliver will drive good customers away. It doesn't matter how good the newsletters are or how many sorry it contains.

I'm sure there are thousands more at Dreamhost who has 10-100 times more traffic than me. I'm not sure if they're all ok, perhaps they never bother looking at their logs to see how many customers they lost or happy with Google analytics, which doesn't show those errors.

My new host is good so far, I miss Dreamhost's panel, it is by far the best. But it is a great relieve to see all the 503 errors drop to 0 for the first time in 4 months and I'm happy serving again.

Thanks to the helpful crowd here, sometimes more or less pleasant, but always helpful. All the best for those who stayed.

Sadly I have to say I'm having exactly the same problems with exactly the same answers from support. The load goes up to >50, I contact support, root logs in, load goes down to 5-10 (still to high), support says they checked the server and found abusive users/processes and now my sites are working fine. After at least a few days it repeats.

I really like the features and the atmosphere here, but the frustration is really growing on me.... they already switched me to a new server a year ago and it worked fine for a few weeks but now it's the same.

Jan

I've been here since '06 and love the support staff, they are just great to work with. They have a few really bright people working here who can always figure it out quickly, its just they have a lot to do.

My only complaint with DreamHost is of course the fact that a couple DH customers have free reign to do whatever they want to other DH customers, I've had my rewards account revoked, my DHSOTM win overturned, and now they've also permanently banned me from contributing to the wiki, which I enjoyed being one of the top contributors to until I had a disagreement with one of the people and the next day my account was permanently banned.

Whenever I've tried to contact DreamHost about it I somehow always get routed to the same guy who I think is one of the smartest people DH has, but noone seems to realize how many customers have been abused by these people. I used the callback feature for the first time ever to call anyone in the award-winning democracy that is DH so I could get my wiki account unbanned and also push for their removal from any position of power for no other reason than they are the worst kind of admin. Lording over others, getting personal, interfering, ganging up on people, and just the worst admins I've ever seen running anything. They hurt DH customers, they hurt DH's reputation, they hurt DH financially, and who the heck is responsible for making their volunteer positions set in stone? I admin several sites and its just embarrassing to all of us for this to go on when many pople would volunteer who would be much better qualified and anyone could do a better jobat not harrassing and driving away you own customers.

It is very odd to be driven away from a company I love by a couple of people who aren't on the payroll and indeed should be recruiting me to contribute to the wiki and forum. Something is very wrong here!

All this is apparently going on without anyone at DH knowing that such damage is being done. My lenghty heart-felt request asking for anyone at DH to help me out was answered with a 1-line email saying they had cancelled my callback request.

Thanks for caring DreamHost... if that is your real name.


Unless I am able to get through to someone who can get some qualified or even semi-qualified admins in here then I'll be joining nocloo and leaving DreamHost as soon as I decide on a replacement host..

I've had some smaller hosting companies (like DH used to be) offer me some sweet incentives to move over with them, and all the salespeople I've talked with want to know what exactly I was unhappy about at DH adn if I would be publishing articles about any dislikes, security issues, that would encourage others to avoid them. I still believe in DH and Im still waiting for someone to do the right thing.

So far I haven't found a host that meets all my technical requirements. And I haven't found another company with such excellent customer support. Id really like to stay with DreamHost but these people have been so successful at getting DH to do whatever they want DH to do, that is pretty scary.

I'm worried that they'll shut my whole account down for no reason, and that would be a disaster for my company and my family. So unless DH decides they want to make this right then I have no choice but to move to another host for my job and families sake. Once gone the last remaining bit of leverage that these people have over me is gone.. they've literally banned blocked and barred me from every possible thing except this forum and my main account. I'm really looking forward to being able to return as a customer to DreamHost and resume the bliss that I had until deciding to check out the DreamHost Discussion Forum... Big mistake as it turned.

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