DH Server locations

Are all the servers located in CA? Do they have any east coast servers?

I have a VPS and it seems quite slow and it seemed slow when I was also on shared.

If they don't have anything on the east coast then they should. Check out spam.la if you are on the east coast it is ridiculous how quick this data center is.

Edited by michael on 08/27/08 11:21 PM (server time).

It is my understanding the one of the servers is based in the master bathroom of Josh's apartment (just behind the laundry bin), and the other is situated on the Tharsis Bulge (the eastern slope of Olympus Mons, to be exact). Plans are afoot to add a third server at Earth–Moon L4, although specially-hardened dust protection will be required. DreamHost are also planning to compensate customers who suffer from poor latency with the Tharsis server by giving them a free coupon for use with the International Star Registry.

-- si-blog --

i am certain it's behind this laundry bin, but i could be wrong.

The proximity of a server does not effect speeds as much as you'd want us to believe. If that were the case I'd be downloading everything at dialup rate considering I'm practically on the opposite side of the globe. If you are experiencing slowdowns it might be beneficial to run some traceroutes to see if you have a routing issue with your connection.

I don't entirely understand the OP's desire for east coast locality. Maybe it's because my sites are accessed from a variety of locations around the country and around the world, but it seems like a zero sum game where a west coast datacenter means west coast users have 30ms latency and east coast users have 90ms latency whereas an east coast datacenter means that east coast users have 30ms latency and west coast users have 90ms latency.

In the absence of a sophisticated edge network, thinking about latency in terms of where a datacenter is located is a zero sum game if your users are geographically distributed.

If ultra-low latency is the OP's desire and all his or her users are on the east coast, then I hate to say it but finding a host with a datacenter on the east coast might be the only solution.

Generally, though, I'm with sXi in wondering how latency could be such a big issue?

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The reason for the post was likely for advertising purposes. I thought I'd reply to it in case someone read it and assumed that a few ms ping difference would be detremental to overall pipe speed or server performance in general.

Hi All, while this thread is fresh I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask a quick question.

My clients are UK-based Joomla sites, would I see *any* improvement in response time if I upgraded from the basic package? Perhaps a unique IP address or Dreamhost PS?

Any suggestions anyone? Cheers.

As far as ping is concerned, no.

It will, however, make a difference if your site (or someone else's) is overloading the shared server you're on. With PS you are guaranteed that resources are set aside for your website (and/or database) rather than sharing resources between yourself and a few other account holders residing on the same machine.

I agree, SXi.

To the OP: A lot has to do with where the perceived "sluggishness" is coming from. Have you looked at the sites in the Firebug network view? That'll tell you the response time for each separate element of the site. From this information, you can usually figure out whether the overall responsiveness is bottlenecked by certain elements of the page. This will often tell you whether it's slowness from a large number of multimedia elements, specific plugins, or certain database calls coming from different parts of the page.

Of course, it won't tell you the actual database calls. You have to figure them out from inspecting the source code after you figure out which parts of the site are the slowest.

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Yes very true. The location does not make that big of a difference

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