customer satisfaction

Hi, I was thinking of hosting a few web sites here on dreamhost. How many of you are happy with dreamhost??

I am :D

Reasonably happy.

I am. Kinda Bland question though - especially as we're all customers. Execpt for the few people who hate dreamhost, I think most people here will be happy. Just my two cents.



-Matttail

super happy :-)

happylittlethings.com

Count me in as a happy DreamHost customer. I have three domains hosted with DreamHost since 2003.
Some customers have complained about server reliability/performance (noticed the recent wave of complaints in the forums?), but I have not experienced any major problems--I live in Australia, so it is possible I may have been asleep when all the problems occurred.
Cheers,
marsbar

Add me to the happy list, but note that if an unhappy one (or an ex-customer with nothing better to do) decides to post, they usually make more noise than happy ones. ;)

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...but note that if an unhappy one (or an ex-customer with nothing better to do) decides to post, they usually make more noise than happy ones.

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I am not entirely convinced that that is the case with Dreamhost. Some of the people here are quite rabid to the point of absurdity about their love of DH ;)

I wasted a couple of years host-hopping due to poor service, 'til hosting a few domains at DH. The excellent service and reliability here made me forget about the "dark days," about a year ago, with those other hosts. Gee, thanks for bringin' it all back- lol! DreamHost rocks!

~Chell
http://www.chellsroost.com

I'm extremely satisfied with the services that DH offers. I have been using a series of hosting poviders in Denmark (Europe) before, and they all disappointed me in areas such as reliability, security, customer service, and cost/benefit ratio.

DreamHost was a leap to a U.S. hosting company, and I don't think I could have landed anywhere better. Prices are excellent, but what are prices without security, reliability and service. It's there too -- along with a hundred included features that I'd have to pay extra for or couldn't get at all from the previous hosts.

(Oh, and the folks over at horrible Azero ought to be shot by dawn.)

TorbenGB

Count me as a happy customer!

extremely happy!

DH is one of the few webhosts I've been on that knows how to do things right.

While they are a bit slow getting things upgraded, it's only cause things are done right (anybody in any corperation knows how things go soooo slowly when *all* steps are done).

I'm new here (started checking out DreamHost about 10 days ago, paid up Saturday, "approved" Monday or Tuesday) and so far I'm very pleased.

I was initially a bit concerned about the delays. Several years ago, new hosts had me set up in hours (using IP address temporarily until DNS propagated). More recently it was minutes or even seconds. My last 2 or 3 hosts used cPanel, and changes made through the panel typically were activated immediately or within minutes. As well as 2-3 days to activated the server (or to give me control of it), I'm regularly finding delays of a couple of hours e.g. adding domains, subdomains, emails, and just now when I realised that SSH has to be activated manually, the panel told me it might take up to 2 hours.

So if you're addicted to instantaneous response, then you may be disappointed.

However, during the waiting periods, I not only had plenty of other things to get on with but also time to reflect on what might be happening.

It's obvious that DreamHost is highly automated. (Cheap hosting *has* to be! I signed up on the My Code Monster SALE! - how much techie time can they afford to pay, for a customer paying $16/month, let alone a level 1 customer on $8/month?) So all my actions - signing up and, later, managing and customising via the panel - must have produced almost instantaneous results.

So I figure the delays must involve human intervention: automated actions place tasks on a human being's task queue.

I used to like cPanel when it was new, but over time I found it had numerous defects, and my hosts consistently operated on the assumption that - until a user files a support ticket - everything works as intended all the time.

A few routine checks prior to activating changes could prevent a lot of time wasted by users and techies, so if that is the explanation for the delays, I'm happy.

Apart from the delay issue, I've found everything superb, with better functionality and resources than I've had previously.

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So I figure the delays must involve human intervention: automated actions place tasks on a human being's task queue

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Everything's automated (if people had to do stuff by hand it would take days, not hours!). Our backend architecture is really cool, flexible, and scalable, but isn't always fast. That's one of the big things we're working on this year.

Our backend systems run about 80,000 jobs a day to configure software, add domains, etc.


nate.

as Nate shown, when dealing with that many requests, it's often much more efficient to queue up the requests and process them on a scheduled task/cron.

I had to build a system doing very much the same thing. We had it run on an hourly cron job. It would read a file list of actions to perform; add accounts, add/remove domains, add/remove ftp/shell, etc. Then it would thread off processes (fork; it was done in Perl) to do everything.

It was pretty efficient and didn't have any complaints that I can think of. It didn't take very long to perform 1 request, but when you have a file with over 100 requests, it could take a good 20+ minuntes!

We used an LDAP backend, so add/removing was relatively simple compared to any Rational DB.

Again thanks for all the replies to my question. I am now a new customer of DH and migrating 6 web sites here. I like the "community" feel that DH has build with the forum and well as the FAQ's and Wiki ..

thanks

Splendid! Welcome to our community. :-)
All the best -
marsbar

Dreamhost is fantastic when everything works as it does most of the time. But reaction time is crucifyingly slow when there are problems, especially if they happen outside the West Coast standard office hours. As we're based in Europe and we experience problems in the morning, this means that NOTHING, NADA, ZILCH usually happens until early evening - almost one entire business day lost.

To their credit things usually get resolved within three hours of them turning up at the office, but I'd consider carefully if this is acceptable if you're based in a different time zone. E.g., the problem that we experienced yesterday (backed up emails causing 10+ hour delays) wasn't properly resolved, meaning that we have to wait another full working day before any kind of action. I'd happily pay a premium rate for the availability of an emergency 24h support.

I've been ecstatic since switching this past February.

Count me as an unhappy, uncustomer.. (I still pay for hosting till my year is up, but I don't actualy host any sites here any more).

Email bugs, email outtages, and sql outtages were too much for me.

-Jason

I40.com - Home Page
MP3Mystic - Personal Streaming Music server.
(No longer hosted with Dreamhost)

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Email bugs, email outtages, and sql outtages were too much for me.

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Didn't have any, didn't see any, and didn't experience any. Thus far, I've been more than delighted with my time as a DreamHost customer.

I'm a reasonably happy DH customer as well. When things work, they work well. The Control Panel, although not always super-speedy, is phenomenal. A lot of development time was spent on it, and it shows. The "One-click" installs are extremely convenient, and allow for rapid prototyping of forums or blogs for clients (or yourself).

That being said, when things aren't working, response time and communication are less than ideal. However, I know that DreamHost "Gets It" and there are good people behind the scenes (Dallas, Nate, Josh, formerly Will) who know what's going on and what people are complaining about in the forums. :) You'll be happy with your choice. I know I am.

Edited by mbaizman on 06/07/05 08:03 AM (server time).

In the last 15 or so months, there was one fairly annoying (almost weekend long) email outage due to a raid failure.

That was a tad annoying, but the only problem I've seen. For the price, dreamhost has been great.

Hopefully the raid issue was isolated. Other then, a content customer.

I've been with DH for about 7 months. *Every* shared host has had its share (no pun intended) of downtime and delays. I've had my sites hosted with 4 different companies over the years, and I've supported other sites at other companies. I see no reason to switch.

DH downside:

1. Tech support could be better. My last host answered all tickets within 15 minutes. 9 times out of 10 the problem resolves itself or you get an answer somewhere else before DH tech support gets back to you.

2. Very, very ugly control panel. I know this isn't a beauty contest, but the interface could be so much better. And even when it's running fast it's a bit on the slow side.

3. If you have a lot of domains (I have 10 fully hosted domains, a handful of sub domains and a bunch of domains that are redirecting to fully hosted domains) seeing what's what can get dicey. I'd love a toggle on the "domains" tab that showed only the fully hosted ones, or only the redirects, etc.

4. There's no good reason that new email addresses take hours to activate. Come on, people.

DH upside:

1. Price. Thanks to referrals I can't remember the last time I actually paid a monthly DH bill. :-)

2. You get a whole lot for the money. And it lives up to the promise 99% of the time which is good enough for me.

3. One click installs of popular open source software

4. Alternate SMTP port. Now that most broadband ISPs are blocking port 25, you can't believe how big a selling point it is to be able to use mail.domain.com for incoming and outgoing. Not all hosts have this.

Hi Mezz,
I used to be on GoDaddy but although their $ price is lower, that's the only thing that is good about them. If you factor in customer service and the fact that you will move to DreamHost eventually anyway (since their low end plan is better and cheaper than GoDaddy's almost equivalent plan), why waste your time and all the hassle of moving?

If you want more reasons send me a private message and I'll give you a more in depth review.

Regards,

Peter Koning

I'm very happy.I was referred to DH by another happy user.

Lots of space and I love the fact that when they add new stuff, all the current users get it too. Unlike other providers who don't grandfather in new additions.

Two thumbs up for DH.

I am a new user, and my site has experienced a lot of problems. Many were due to different versions of PHP and the like, and my support queries about these were handled very well (though not quickly).

However now that my site is up and running there seem to be a lot of failures of the MySQL server, and web pages. I have connections failing sometimes (and working others), pages not available (but only sometimes), users booted out (but then getting back in) etc. In short the service has been unreliable and cursed with intermittant failures. Worse the support response so far has been "nothing seems to be wrong on our end, the server is stable, are you sure its our fault?" This is not very useful!

So time will tell ...