From Australia

Hi Everyone!

Sydney calling here ... just been looking at the various hosting plans on offer by DreamHost. I have also read this forum (and a few others) and from what I read, it appears customer service delays may be an issue for me if I were to join.

Obviously living in another hemisphere is a worry in terms of time zone differences and so on, however I wonder if 24/7 email really means that? I suspect not.

Further, I am worried about latency issues ... this is certainly no fault of "DreamHost" but something I must consider if I am to take up a hosting package.

I wonder how many Australians are hosting their sites with DreamHost and their experiences?

In reply to:

---

Hi Everyone!

---

Hi from a fellow Aussie (Southern Vic here :)

I've been hosting with DreamHost for a little while and overall the experience has been a pleasant one.

The time-zone difference isn't a major problem, I have almost trained myself to think in two time zones now. :) Since I have been with DreamHost I've had a couple of small outages, but support requests sent via the Web panel were answered promptly and the problems were resolved very quickly.

As for latency; Most of my visitors are not from Australia, so the US seemed as good a place as anywhere to host and the space/bandwidth on offer just wasn't available here in Australia, at least not at a reasonable price point.

I guess the latency might be an issue if most of your visitors are from Australia, but in my opinion this should not be a major problem. Pages might have a small initial delay before coming up, but in my experience this is hardly noticable and more than compensated for by the features offered by DreamHost.

Anyway, if you have any specific questions on hosting with DreamHost from an Australian perspective, ask away. :)

Mark

Not that I'm from Australia, but as a customer for a bit over a year with Dreamhost adverage support response time (for me) is about 2 hours. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more. I've never had a ticket go more than 24 hours with out some kind of a response.



-Matttail

Hello fellow Sydneysider,

I've been with dreamhost for over a year now but while I haven't really used my account as my main one, overall I've had a positive experience.

With support, sometimes the responses are within hours while other times it took a bit longer. One time it took over a day to get a response. My support requests haven't been critical so far so the delays aren't really an issue.

As for latency issues, I think that Dreamhost are one of the fastest connecting to Sydney as they're on the west coast and have pretty good connectivity.

Thanks for these replies ... really has helped!

Here from Paris i have 150ms latency (+22ms for my dsl line).

That's 75ms/way
based on speed light and with bird flight, it would take 30ms (~9100km).

In fact, there is ~35ms/way lost on 1 link,
about everything (exept 2~4ms) i taken by :

(Near Paris) globalcrossing.GW.opentransit.net <> so0-0-0-622M.ar1.LAX3.gblx.net (Los Angeles).

And this link seems to be often a bit overloaded.

Hi fellow Aussie,

I'm hosting one site on DreamHost that is directed at Australian use only, and to date I have not had any complaints about latency issues, on average the pings are around 200ms from southern Victoria, if you like you can try my site (www.aussietoolboxes.com.au) and check latency and speed, there are several large images in the gallery you can use for speed testing.

Hope this helps with your decision.

Thanks "Shonky" ... appreciate that. Your toolboxes look great and showed up rather quickly!!