Give me the negitive stuff

I an thinking of moving here, and have seen lots and lots of great stuff about dreamhost, but no one is perfect, and I want to know the bad stuff with dreamhost.
What ever it may be, I want to hear the negitive experinces you've had, so that I can correctly compare it to my current host.

First and foremost, the bad stuff is lack of really quick support. They promise to answer within 24 hours but they have been bad at keeping that promise for many months now. They say they have hired additional support staff and they are being trained now, but the lack of quick support is one of the biggest pains at the moment. DH offers support by email only, plus phone callback only if you have one of the bigger plans AND you're in the USA.

The other big issue is that DH has grown immensely in the past months, and it appears that DH has not been able to maintain the service quality. Some servers run slowly sometimes, there have been mysterious network outages, mail servers are overloaded, and so on. DH says they're working on improving this too, but we're not seeing great advances being made yet.

That's the really bad news. The better news is that DH is still a great place to be. DH has one of the best price/value offerings around, and many customers are complaining but staying after all because they love DH so much anyway.

This is my impression of things at the moment. I don't have any problems with support, but I notice the strain on the servers sometimes.

> First and foremost, the bad stuff is lack of really quick support.

I was about to say that too. Their promised turnaround (24 hours) is not good enough in these days of fierce competition; their actual turnaround may exceed that sometimes, making it worse. But then to be fair, I very often hear back from them in just a few hours.

The other IMPORTANT drawback is the lack of a reliable uptime report mechanism. When your website is down, you can't really tell where the problem is. This is particularly bad when you are hosting YOUR clients, and don't know what to tell them.

~3Mbps from europe
I saw better.

Okay. You spell it n-e-g-a-t-i-v-e. </sarcasm>

My worst experiences on dreamhost don't even compare with the beginings of the bad stuff with another hosting provider

I've been a customer for 7 years, and I have no complaints (apart from the sluggish support like others)

Nothing really negative. Every company has some issues but I haven't found any reason to look elsewhere. I think they could communicate more with their customers as far as tech. support and survey us to address any concerns.

Other than that no real complaints.

I signup three days ago and my first negative impression is the BIG time to response support enquires :{

I dont receive human reply yet.

Now I need test the services host as soon my account start enabled.

My personal experience from 6 months of support at DreamHost doesn't agree with most of what I've read here - I've always had a response AND resolution within 24 hours and usually get some kind of email response within a couple of hours - often with resolution especially if its a problem (no email, site issues etc) vs. a question, suggestion.

Since I joined they maxed out the bandwidth and storage to the point where its a non issue for me. The biggest deal was unlimited domains though. That has saved me tons!

The only real negative I find is spam filtering - although spam assassin is used, and you can run it manually yourself via a procmail filter, I think it could be a lot nicer. My ISP has a great set up and configuration UI for Spam Assassin so it can be done.

Also for many the confusion between ids for email boxes, real shell and ftp users, and giving access to sites and FTP directories can be confusing and too awkward for them. Stuff like having to choose a user name unique to not just your domain but the entire DreamHost user space (or some subset thereof) can be irritating - but not as hard as trying to find a user name on Yahoo, GMail or AOL! Yes there are simpler interfaces available elsewhere but it just doesn't fit with how DreamHost's user management works - they have a much more direct mapping to Unix users than anyone else. But really its a minor inconvenience compared to all the benefits.

Overall two thumbs, two big toes and a whole bunch of other digits up from me, minor warts-n-all.

Here's the obligatory discount: TECHTIMEMAX for the maximum discount on all plans.

Ask yourself, who else gives you such a crazy insane referral program as DreamHost? It really doesn't take much to get yourself free hosting for life or even make money - who could ask for more?

Re the spam I fwd my email (don't use the DH mailboxes) to spamcop.net where I retrieve the email. Works well.

Hope that helps someone.

Cheers,
Peter

In reply to:

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My worst experiences on dreamhost don't even compare with the beginings of the bad stuff with another hosting provider

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That sums it up right there. The outages are annoying, but from the uptimes I've experienced, along with the personal recommendations that my friend has made, I'm probably gonna be here for a while.

I just started an account here and while it's not perfect I really dig how much they give us here for such a small price. The community is great -something non-existant in my other host and the guys running the company aren't complete tight asses. They're just a bunch of geeks. :)

The first day or so a site I was running was rendering very slow. Without me asking they transferred me to another machine. Co-incidendence? Maybe but the site is running very smoothly now.

I don't need instant response from support so if you do, perhaps try for the bigger package for the telephone support. They've helped me within 24 for all my support questions.

-Joon
{ dvessel }