I've been with Dreamhost for a short time compared to most here, but I'm actually happy so far. I've dealt with support on numerous issues in the past 8 or 10 months and they've helped every time. I'm only posting here because I see one user complaining that he was shut down for abusing the living hell out of a shared server. Honestly, what did you expect?
The reason for my coming to dreamhost wasnt because I wanted a new host. At the time, I was using a reseller account on another host for $24.99/mth with 200gb/mth on bandwidth. I wasnt actually doing much with it. Hosting friends sites, etc. I was using maybe, maybe, 10-20gb in bandwidth, then i started hosting images out to a few popular forums and my bandwidth spiked to 100gb/mth. They shut me down, locked me out and kicked me off. No support, no messages, no responses, just gone. For a spike in bandwidth on a reseller account, and they claimed not to be overselling...
Here on the other hand, I've done worse then that by several times over. I'm hosting random images to forums, I'm running a small dynamic sig program that pushes out plenty of images. On top of that, I'm hosting out bandwidth to a COD4 Mod server that is pulling between 2 and 9gb a day.
If that seems annoying enough on a shared, I'm using up a lot of sql time too. I push almost 2 million queries a day. (with a ratio of 400, so its all organized well and good) It adds between 1000 and 50000 rows a day at 1.13 million rows as of now. Not really that much considering that the mysql server is pushing 146,000 select queries, 31,000 updates and 1,600 inserts ... an hour. In 5.5 days, its done 23,000,000+ queries, just on those 3 types. My site though, loads fairly quick.
About a week ago, I noticed it was slowing a bit, especially since i'd hit the 1 million mark on rows. I ignored it since it was being updated by a cron and isnt a big issue in terms of views a day (maybe 400 total by about 200 users). I got a wonderful email, not sarcasm, actually a wonderful email, from Justin. He actually saw the load that one query was applying (this isnt my script, and it seemed to be well indexed when i installed it), and found a quick solution by creating a new index. I figured that this was the best support i'd ever seen. he ... helped me. i didnt get shut down, suspended, blocked, banned, etc. he actually helped me. One index took a 5,000 row query at 6 seconds down to a 1 row query at 0.01 seconds.
Actually, as a side note to the index he fixed for me, I've noticed that instead of showing 0 days and 21 hours of played time in the game server, as it always had on the main page that has that data, it now shows the proper 831 days of played time that it should. So he fixed 2 issues without even warning me once. He sent me an FYI email to say what he did. Some people would like to be told in advance, some wouldnt. I prefer to be told in advance, but when it saves my account from likely being suspended for it, i'm all for it.
I've dealt with DH Support on a few issues. I've had mostly good experiences, with only one bad (one where 5 people didnt know what in the hell i was talking about, then one guy came back from his weekend off and knew exactly what i meant. this was a very unique set of circumstances so i dont hold it against any of the other support people since it probably wasnt asked before that day, or 4 days).
Weighing my options. I love DH as a whole. I'm used to CPanel, but the DH Panel is fine for most things. The Support rocks (the issue above with Justin, I sent a response a few hours after his email and received a response in 20 minutes). The place rocks. They let me expand from using 1-2gb a month when i moved over (after leaving my domain offline for a few weeks) to almost 200gb/mth without any issue. I've abused SSH on plenty of occasions to get a file from another server at 10mb/s instead of uploading from home at 80kb/s. Bad indexes on sql that they helped me fix twice.
In other words, DH is either loved or hated. I love it. I love the support. And, for your complaint of expansion and overselling... http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/ - its old. but it still applies.
And as for your site ... yea, 40,000 members... ok. fine.
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in D:\home\minare.net\httpdocs\tr\wp-content\plugins\WP_SMF\smf_api_1.1.php on line 903
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in D:\home\minare.net\httpdocs\tr\wp-includes\wp-db.php on line 94
thats usually a bad thing to have pop up ... and a windows server. ......
88,527 Messages 13,339 Topics Users: 42,088 Members
.... thats a little more then 2 posts per member. Honestly, not that many. Yea, it'll be a good number of sql lines and such, but using a very well indexed forum wouldnt kill you either. It takes a bit to load (Though, its showing Germany as the host) and in the half hour since my last load, thats gone up to 88,531 posts, same number of topics, but 42,103 members.
Honestly, that seems a bit off to me. I'm on a forum with only 630 members and we have 12,000 posts. Your counts seem a little lopsided. Take out our 2 highest posters, and we still have 8,000 posts on 628 users. (they spam a lot...) Given, thats with only about 200 posting users. The rest are 0 counts. But moving it up, leaving my 2 high out. if we had kept this pace to 42103 users and kept pace on posts as well (this is 8000 for 628 users), I should expect 536000 posts. Now, thats being unreasonable. I would expect under half that with 42k users. The forum i used to post at had 124k users (this is 2 years ago, at that) and held 1.3m posts. one topic was 25k posts long. thats still over 5 posts a user, offset by the daily posters vs the 0 posters. You might want to look into that a bit. I was told SMF was a good forum, but the forum I mention above with 1.3m was running a slightly customized version of vbulletin. Most current forums can handle the load you have with very very few hiccups.
In closing. Dreamhost rocks. You had a bad experience, fine. But dont bust on them for trying to help you as best they could. They shut you down for overuse of resources. All hosts will do that. I suspect you'll be on your current hosts forums in a few months, if that, to complain that they shut you down. If you keep expanding at the rate you are, with user counts, you will need to get a virtual or dedicated box to handle the loads. You think its bad now, wait until the post counts sky rocket a bit. You'll see serious issues with loads due to expansion and your going to hate it. No reasonable shared host will take and allow a site to keep running if it eats the server to bits.
My recommendation, get a small virtual server, doesnt matter where, and this way you can expand it as needed to support loads. And for the love of everything, get off of the win server and get on a good *nix or *bsd host. if you plan to keep expanding, your going to need it.
--John V
