Opinion on moving to Dreamhost

Hi - I'm considering moving to Dreamhost from another host. My site takes a lot of bandwidth a month and we're still growing. We jumped from less than 5 gigabytes a month to approximately 15 gigabytes a month within a few days once (forcing us to move to my current host) and within six months of us being with this host, we've jumped from 15 gigs up to 34 gigabytes.

As you can probably tell not only is cheap, affordable hosting a major issue but so to up-time and customer service. My previous host, despite promising a 99% up-time, have gone down frequently. To add insult to injury, their customer service has been slow and frequently useless - repeated attempts to get a problem fix has resulted in stone walling or silence and sometimes problem 'tickets' have been resolved - without actually fixing the problem in the first place.

Dreamhost was recommended to me by one of my users, and on the surface they seem good. I sent a query to their sales department two months ago about Paypal - a formality really since I was more than happy to sign up - and received no answer. Ditto two days ago when I resent the query.

This is a worrying sign. I have several questions, I hope that you all here can help me.

1) What are their levels of customer service like? Has customer service gone down in the past few months?
2) What about their 2-year contract paid up front? Any catches?
3) What are their up-times like? I know this changes from server to server but has anybody had severely bad up-times?

Many thanks!

> My previous host, despite promising a 99% up-time, have gone down frequently.

You mean 99.9%, do you? Anything lower than 99.5% is totally unacceptable. I wouldn't even consider a host whose uptime is not higher than 99.7%.

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IMO Customer servier is very good. I have been with a few hosts before, and I've had expirence like yours. Dreamhost has allways provided me with good intelligent responses. And they have allways fixed my issues the first time around.

Dreamhost is currently expirencing a few "growing pains" becuase of the popularity of the plans and this sale. Just recently (month maybe month and a half), support responses have been a little slow. They guarantee a 24 hour response, but the last ticket I submited get a first reply at 25 hours, was passed on to a specialist, and then fixed with in one business day.

According to the monthly newsletter they have allready hired server new support staff and are in the process of training them.

I signed up with a 2 year contract, and to me there are no catches. You have to pay up front (obviously) but you still get the 91 day money back guarantee if you're not totally satisfied. It's been great.

I have had great up time with my sites. They keep a emergency status page that you can visit should things really go wrong. I've only used it once, and it told me they were rebooting machines from kernal updates, and my site was back up in 3 or 4 min.

They've had some problems with MYSQL servers recnetly, being slow, but I never encounted the problem personally.

Overall I think Dreamhost is one of the best Hosts any where today. Hope this helps. :)



-Matttail

You need to consider performance before making the move. I have 11 sites on Dreamhost - takes a lot of time to move as they are all database driven.
Worse mistake I ever made! You have read about performance issues in this forum? My sites went from subsecond response to 10 - 40 seconds!!!! I even set up identical sites on Dreanhost and another "commercial grade" host and it's not the application...

So, I have over half my clients asking to either "fix" the performance problem or I lose them.

I know, I know - I read of people that have never had performance problems with Dreamhost. The people I have talked with in person have a different story - SLOW!

So, you have the up time - performance is not too bad for straight html - lots of bandwidth - cheap price. You get what you pay for.

You aren't coming from cyberpixels.com are you? Your complaints oddly match the same complaints I had with them. In fact, they billed me this month, yet they didn't bill me in Jan. or Feb. considering I cancelled my service with them. Somehow they thought billing me this month would be okay though.

You're about as funny as a crotch--Archie Bunker