Kudos to Dreamhost

I just wanted to let you guys know how happy I am with your service, and I figured there was no better place to put it than the forum where people come to find out about it.

I'll temper it a little, first: we know there are bumps. But 1) you guys are attentive and actually seem to care about getting services working, and 2) for ten bucks a month you just can't beat the service.

I've been meaning to post something here for a while, but I just went to dreamhoststatus.com and that put me over the edge. Let me share with you a story of a previous host I was trying before I moved my site to DH:

I run abevigoda.com, and there was a Firefox extension that would load up my site and report the abe vigoda status. There was some bug with the extension, so a small number of browsers would hit the site a massive number of times (as many as 8 times a second in some cases). I couldn't handle that on my home network any more so I moved the server offsite to another host (coughvistapagescough). I wasn't sure if they'd be able to handle the traffic any better, but they had a 30-day moneyback guarantee, so I figured I'd try it.

My site got there, it didn't work. Too much traffic. I said okay, no harm done, I'll remove the site and you can give me my money back. They said, oh no: you violated out terms of agreement, so the guarantee doesn't apply! What? How was I supposed to know their servers couldn't handle traffic I have no control over? If I moved a really popular site over to theirs, and it had too much traffic, would they tell me my site was so popular, it violated their TOS?

In the end I just had to tell them I was going to do a chargeback on the credit card (which is bad news for any merchant, but they just wouldn't budge). And the last mail I got from them was a guy telling me that chargebacks aren't automatic, and he would do whatever he could to make sure I wouldn't get my money. Nice! (I did get the money.)

That was a year ago. I'm reminded of this story because two nights ago I got a bill for $9.95 from them for no reason I can determine. I sent them a mail saying I'm not going to pay it because I cancelled this last year and haven't used any service of theirs, and in response I got a terse message saying they'd be sending it to collections.

So. My whole point is that my previous experience with grumpy web hosts is so strongly in contrast to what I've seen from DH, that I'm glad to host my sites here.

Gee, your previous host sounds like it was a real nightmare. It sure does sound like they were not keen on giving you your (deserved) refund.

I am glad you are finding Dreamhost to be better for your needs. I too have been extremely happy with Dreamhost since being here. It hasn't been perfect, but any problems seem to be fixed without too much fuss.

As you said, for the money not many hosting companies can compare to DreamHost. :)

Oh, actually I realized I mistyped it: they said "too much cpu usage", but the site's a total of two php pages with no more complex processing than displaying the current time and date. So it really was about too much traffic.

But even though that was kinda a nightmare, I've never had a more friendly and attentive host at this price level. And in fact even more expensive business-level ISPs I've seen don't have the level of friendliness I've seen here, and I just love the new dreamhoststatus site.

I want to include dreamhost on a "praise" email...do they have an email I can CC to?

In reply to:
I want to include dreamhost on a "praise" email...do they have an email I can CC to?

That seems like an odd request. If you need to contact them, I recommend that you use the Control Panel instead of a regular email address. There is a "compliment" option on the form.

Agreed! Nice of you to take the lead and send some positive remarks.. Unusual yes, Good for Karma TOTALLY!

I read something the other day that was saying how the web is moving from economic reward to social reward... sounds kinda "Hippy" but karma seems to be making a comeback... the 00's are the new 60's ;)

Peace man!

In reply to:
I'm glad to host my sites here.

I must say it is refreshing to see a positive post regarding DreamHost. People rarely create threads to say everything is working fine and they are happy. :)

I too am glad I made the choice to host my sites here at DreamHost. Sure, things did get a little scratchy a little while ago, with the panel and these forums being extremely slow for me (however, my sites were fine), but the folks at DreamHost seem to have rectified this and things are great now.

Mark