Is dreamhost really thus bad?

Been a customer now 2 weeks and during that time the web server has been unreachable atleast 2 times and the database server unreachanble from the web server atleast 4 times.. each of those outtages has been >30 minutes that we have noticed.... and not all that actively monitoring it.

Lucky for me the actual site is not in use and only on testing, but the level of outtages is way wrong...

Is there any use in continuing or should I cancel allready and get some other hosting?

Unfortunately, you have have not chosen a great time to evaluate DreamHost, the last few weeks have been the worse I can recall since being with DreamHost.

First they had a major file server crash (and re-crash) which apparently exposed internal network issues, then they had to contend with a major power outage and a UPS system that failed to do what it was supposed to.

Thankfully, the techs seem to have most things under control now, but there are apparently still some residue issues they are working on.

I have no doubt that everything will return to its normal non-eventful status quo soon, in fact my sites have been problem free for a few days now.

DreamHost has stated that they have learned a few things during these troubles and are taking steps to prevent similar hardware failures from having such a drastic effect on the network.

you can read all about the recent problems at the links below;

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/
http://blog.dreamhost.com/

In reply to:

---

Is there any use in continuing or should I cancel allready and get some other hosting?

---

I suggest hanging in there for a while, as I said above; The last few weeks are definitely not indicative of the level of quality usually provided by DreamHost. If you paid by credit card, you have 97 days to decide if DreamHost is for you.

Mark

I've been with them since 2001, and though they have their problems, I've found that the good far outweighs the bad.

You have 97 days to figure out if you want to stay, so even if it was a bad 2 weeks, I'd still give it more time to see how it goes, then go from there.

I agree with Raz. The problems have only been recent!

Dreamhost are doing everything they can to solve these problems. We'll just have to wait and see what happens :)

Other than that, I have been with Dreamhost for about a year and I am stress-free. Lol.

I've been with DH for a little over two years now and quite frankly they are THE BEST that I have ever used. Granted they have their share of issues, but I have never been disappointed. I have had questions in the past and either a DH support person or a user was able to help me.

I remember last year they had a major power outage and did everything they could to fix the issue.

One thing to remember is every company has problems. The question is, what do they do in order to not have the same issue again in the future. For the money that DH charges they are worth 10x the amount.

I will never switch from DH.

Personally I would LOVE to work for them. :D
(hint hint)

Me too! I want to work for Dreamhost! :D

In reply to:

---

Me too! I want to work for Dreamhost! :D

---

Are you sure? :)

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/03/09/what-you-get-when-you-work-here/

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/02/01/jackets-of-pain/

Mark

As said above, it's just been recently that I've experienced any real problems. And now they have a generator on fire... maybe God hates DH?

Check out Gordaen's Knowledge, the blog, and the MR2 page.

*waves hands frantically*

THE BACKUP GENERATOR SEEMS TO BE ON FIRE, SCARECROW!!!

Personally, I've about had it with the service. Every day it seems I can count on something bad to happen. File server one day. Router another day. Fire another day. Tomorrow it'll probably be the "Chupacabra Ate Our Servers!"

My site is starting to pick up now, and this past month is probably losing more visitors than I am gaining because of all this.

Sadly, I'll be looking for a new host. :(

Well, I'm also a new DH customer and the flurry of outages recently has me amused, partly because this seems to happen whenever I move to a new host. (Hey, perhaps I can get hosts to pay me to stay away...)

Anyway, I think DH has handled the issues quite well compared to other hosts I've seen and my own site has hardly seen a hiccup.

I have another site on a MUCH larger hosting service - and they too went belly-up for a while the other day due to a power failure. Hosts based in the LA area seem to be especially susceptible to this right around now.

Steve

In reply to:

---

the flurry of outages recently has me amused, partly because this seems to happen whenever I move to a new host.

---

So its your fault? :)

I think Dreamhost have done well to minimise downtime during the recent troubles and I appreciate the effort to keep we customers updated through the Dreamhost status site.

I understand that people are upset if their sites aren't working, but this is the real world, and in the real world things sometimes break.

We appreciate that you all are being so patient. If I were a new customer of ours I would be thinking the same things the original poster mentioned. Frankly, our service has been far from stellar for the past couple of weeks. We have been working feverishly to fix things and the failure of our data center building to maintain steady power has come at an especially bad time. There are things we could have done better in advance of the recent outages but as they say, hindsight is always 20/20. We will be addressing all of this in a future blog post so watch for that. I had wanted to get that out this week but the power outage foiled that plan.

We haven't decided yet what to do about the poor performance of our building. Moving into another building is an obvious possibility but it's not absolutely certain that spending the time and money to do that is actually what's in the best interests of our customer base. We are already in the process of purchasing a UPS system of our own to provide power for the most criticial components of our network. Again hindsight is 20/20 on that decision. We should have done it 10 months ago after the first big power outage.

The power in downtown Los Angeles has been pretty shaky lately. It's not just our building affected. We are definitely weighing our options!



- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

Do I understand correctly that you're in the Garland Building - along with at least one other web host I know of?

Steve

yeppers, they're in the Garland building, apparently as well as Myspace, and some other webhosts.



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

Is this the Garland Building, where they are then? According to Google Earth. It looks a bit of a rough area! Not many trees.



--
Norm

Opinions are my own views, not DreamHosts'.
I am NOT a DreamHost employee OK!!

You act on my advice at your own risk!

That looks like the area, alright! I don't know exactly which building it is, but I know that area all to well. Right in "the heart" of Los Angeles.

It looks "better" from "street level", you see the building facades instead of the roofs.
--rlparker

"The building, known as The Garland Building, has state of the art highly redundant power systems with power drawn from two distinct substations. Additionally, the building was designed so that in an 8.4 earthquake, the raised flooring system will only move ¾ of an inch."

Steve

Using maps.google.com it located a building that seems to match the description. I was reading that there's a helipad on top of the building, and that matches up. See it here



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

Is the helipad so they can flee from potential server fires or is it for other hosts to flee enraged myspace users? ;)

Check out Gordaen's Knowledge, the blog, and the MR2 page.

I wonder why it has to be so large a helipad when the DreamHost helicopter is so small? You would never get all those huge DreamHost executives aboard. You might manage a small packed lunch.

DreamHost Helicopter



--
Norm

Opinions are my own views, not DreamHosts'.
I am NOT a DreamHost employee OK!!

You act on my advice at your own risk!

I'll keep some very low priority domains here because I've pre-paid for a year, but I'm pretty much done with DH. I'm no longer recommending DH to clients and am in the process of getting a dedicated server at another hosting company and moving clients over to it. It's gonna be a painful month and I'm not looking forward to all hte work the domain moves will entail, but it'll be better than dealing with the semi-regular DH meltdowns.

DH has demonstrated very clearly over the three years I've been here that one click installs, and bandwidth/disk space that I'll never use are where their focus is rather than redundancy and a robust network. Nothing wrong with that and they probably know their market better than me, but it's not in line with my priorities. If my websites won't load and I have clients calling me because they can't get their email I really don't care about how much disk space I could use.

number-six,

Your post is very well stated and, I think very fair, and balanced. You make excellent points. IMHO, these kinds of posts, where the issues are discussed rationally and dispassionately, are valuable to have in the forums, and do a great service to someone trying to decide if Dreamhost shared-hosting is "right" for their intended purpose.

I appreciate your perspective and insight. Absolutely "on topic" and relevant. Thanks!

--rlparker

After 7 years I may be moving too.

On the one hand, I just paid $22 for a full year of allegedly unlimited bandwidth. I support this very, very much. Very cool, very aggressive. There's some Gibson quote about small companies, all edge...I can't quite remember it.

On the other hand, I just spent twelve hours feeling like a fool when simple operations failed, only to learn that half a dozen disparate DH features or linked features aren't currently working (I include things like minor changes routinely taking a day or more to go through as "not working").

Then I found these forums. Altogether, it makes for a first impression so bad that $22 for a year that isn't currently even approaching functional seems huge next to $22 dollars for a month elsewhere that I'd already have a page up.

That sounds a lot more negative than I actually feel right now.
Ideally, shared hosting is perfect for me. I just need a place to write my book. Since it isn't a picture book, I could ostensibly get lots of traffic without my co-tenants here ever noticing. Also, from what I see in these forums, the fact is DH literally has to do something about all these problems or their company will likely fail, meaning the sheer extent of the mishaps is a pretty good reason to stick around.

A couple more nights like this, though, and I might better understand a lot of the impatience.

For those who haven't read it, the blog details many of the issues:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an-ongoing-disaster/

Check out Gordaen's Knowledge, the blog, and the MR2 page.

Yes, Dreamhost is really bad and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone. I have been with the since January and it has been constant outage and problems. I would get off dreamhost as fast as I can. I'm stuck for one more month (my best tech person is too busy) then I'm leaving and hoping my business can recover from the damage Dreamhost has caused.

Good points, number six.

I'm with dreamhost since a few months (more than 97 days...) and the last three weeks or so, I have to say that "not impressed" is too mild to put it.

I've had at least three cases where I couldn't send e-mail for more than three hours (like at this very moment AGAIN).

My company is in its startup phase, I simply cannot afford having a hosting company for web/mail services that assigns a different value to 'reliability' than what I need.

I strongly encourage that dreamhost becomes more proactive inasmuch as that outages are communicated to their customers (as the ones I refer to above were known to dreamhost in all cases prior to me noticing it) and also that dreamhost becomes more proactive so that problems of this nature don't occur that often.

With 'are communicated' I mean e-mail notifications, not a status page - am I supposed to check a status page every time before trying to the services I'm paying for?

Okay, well I've been here for under a week, and I left my previous host due to the fact that the speed that the forum was loading had decreased considerably, and the support was fairly poor.

In a week the site has already been down for 1hr 30mins today, and it has gone down once again. So I imagine it will be another age before it is back.

The email support for new customers is pitiful. I'd have imagined that whilst the sites are being set up, that they would be keen to show to new customers that they are keen to help. The "we will reply within 24 hours" basically means, that you will hear something back in 23 hours, usually asking you a question to buy more time....

Not the best of starts.

Oh, and this place came highly recommended too.....hmmm.

Well, my site is up .. but I can't send e-mail since roughly 6.5 hours.

I am seriously considering asking for a full refund and switching to another company.

You don't have to check the status page constantly, you can just grab the RSS feed. That's far more reliable than them sending out e-mails to thousands of people for every little thing that happens.

Check out Gordaen's Knowledge, the blog, and the MR2 page.

Ok, so instead of pressing the light switch and finding out it doesn't work, I shouldn't go to my post box to find a letter saying that there's no power, I'm supposed to look to the sky whether there are smoke signals telling me the same?

I am not impressed by the number of outages and the reliability.

My company's e-mail was down for almost 10:50 hours today. That's the fourth e-mail outage in three weeks that I know about. Two times three hours, once eight and now eleven hours.

In my book, that's not a little thing to happen.

Let me guess how you will ingratiate yourselves with us again...how about offering unlimited domains, unlimited subdomains, unlimited bandwith (non-throttled), unlimited e-mail accounts, unlimited 1-800 support, unlimited, unlimited, unlimited....all for 97 cents a month? Right? :P

and so the cycle will repeat itself....while you may make assertions that you have not "oversold" your services...those of us who have been with this company for anything over a few years can EASILY track the problem times around the same times that you were running sales or deals or "ingratiating deals to not lose our current customers oh please oh please" - when will you ever learn?

Believe it or not, Dallas, it was not dreamhost's chic and oft patronizing responses to crisis that made dreamhost into what it is today....it was all about stability. Stability which has not been evident for anything more than a 3 month stretch in the past two years...excuses....excuses...excuses....you know in my first two years, i doubt i experienced as many issues as i have in the past month....this is what will lead to DHs imminent downfall....and more excuses excuses excuses...heres an idear, maybe FREEZE your new subscriptions - do not take on any more new clients and continue the freeze while you lose some during attrition and fix it well - get it stable, than go after smaller gains over the next year....each time setting a pre-set limit to new memberships.....I am sure you will omit this post and claim that i wasn't being "nice enough" to you as your guidelines state, but it needed to be said.

Downtime is one thing, but simple services like the webpanel being inaccessible is where i draw the line between mediocre service and downright poor.


IAmAtMyWitsEnd

WitsEnd,

July's troubles were independent of the number of customers we have signed up in the last year. If we had signed up 0, the power systems we contracted for would have still failed.

We have nothing to gain from network or stability problems, and therefore nothing to gain from making excuses about them. We are very upfront about what has occurred and what is being done to fix the problems.

I share your sentiment about taking whatever measures necessary to get things fixed and to also prevent such occurrences in the future. But your ideas that we are trying to avoid responsibility or that the problems of July are part of an "imminent downfall" are clearly off the mark.

We do not in any way view great prices and stability as a tradeoff. DreamHost will continue to grow and invest in its infrastructure simultaneously. Our dedication to our customers is sincere and the outpouring of support we have gotten from our truly loyal customers recently has only strengthened that.

I appreciate your criticisms and hope that you are still around as we prove through service that stability is essential to our philosophy.

In reply to:

---

fips - With 'are communicated' I mean e-mail notifications, not a status page - am I supposed to check a status page every time before trying to the services I'm paying for?

---

You suggested e-mail notification.

In reply to:

---

Gordaen - You don't have to check the status page constantly, you can just grab the RSS feed. That's far more reliable than them sending out e-mails to thousands of people for every little thing that happens.

---

I pointed out that RSS is already available and better than e-mail notification.

In reply to:

---

fips - Ok, so instead of pressing the light switch and finding out it doesn't work, I shouldn't go to my post box to find a letter saying that there's no power, I'm supposed to look to the sky whether there are smoke signals telling me the same?

---

Ignoring the comma splicing, yes, that's what I would say to do. Rather than standing around at your "post box" waiting for a letter, you can just glance at the horizon and see the "smoke signals" to know what's going on.... interesting analogy.

I pointed out RSS because you were asking for e-mail notification. RSS is more reliable. RSS is faster. RSS can be read by far more applications, not to mention manipulated. You can throw the feed onto your google desktop. You can read the feed in your e-mail client if you prefer. You could even create a script to read the RSS feed and e-mail you any new additions...

Sorry for trying to help you. I'll try to avoid that in the future.

Check out Gordaen's Knowledge, the blog, and the MR2 page.

<July's troubles were independent of the number of customers we have signed up in the last year. If we had signed up 0, the power systems we contracted for would have still failed.>

Michael, last time I checked my watch, we are well into August at this point and still the same old stability issues....my question to you with regards to this is why? Why is it DH and not the other 3 webhost providers that we currently contract that have the most downtime by far? Why DH? Are you jinxed? Bad decision-making? What is it about DH that seems to be soo snake bitten?

<We have nothing to gain from network or stability problems, and therefore nothing to gain from making excuses about them. We are very upfront about what has occurred and what is being done to fix the problems.>

This I concur with 100%, that you don't have anything to gain from overall network instability....this is what i would hope you realize and would take steps to curtail these issues...you cannot possibly continue this pace of bringing on x number of new clients per day while you are still unstable. As far as you folks being upfront, i may be in a minority here, but i sincerely do not appreciate the "cutesie" outage announcements; I personally think they are oft patronizing - here's an idea, how about just announcing that the servers are down and a "real" estimate as to when they will resume function...You are a business...stop trying to win some sort of bohemian "niceness award", because most of us would take a cold hearted corporate business approach that has fantastic uptime compared to this mess that we have been dealing with recently.

<I share your sentiment about taking whatever measures necessary to get things fixed and to also prevent such occurrences in the future. But your ideas that we are trying to avoid responsibility or that the problems of July are part of an "imminent downfall" are clearly off the mark.>

Michael, we will have to agree to disagree on this note. "imminent downfall" can have several meanings to it....you may survive as a "deep discount" or "budget" hosting provider (which has it's market out there), but the DH of old, has not been present for a very long time and i question you on why your "uptime statistics" were never correct in the panel and I am not even sure if you folks even still share that information - I quit looking awhile back, because the numbers were always wrong. Well, my panel FINALLY loaded (after about 4 minutes and 3 separate tries) and this is what is being displayed by the panel for "server status":

[We have decided to decommission the system status page until we are able to make it more accurately reflect actual system uptimes! Our apologies.
In the meantime, if you can't access your site, there's always dreamhoststatus.com and even blog.dreamhost.com.

Thank you for your understanding!
The Happy DreamHost Realistic Status Team!]

I have no idea how long this message has been present and once again the sign-off "The Happy DreamHost Realistic Status Team!" simply irks me, because we are not "happy" and i personally do not believe that during this crisis that all of your personnel are "happy" either - that is what I am talking about when i say words like "condescending" "patronizing" and "unrealistic".....oh and btw, some of my clients demanded those reports on a regular basis and I lost those clients because of these "unrealistic reports"

<We do not in any way view great prices and stability as a tradeoff. DreamHost will continue to grow and invest in its infrastructure simultaneously. Our dedication to our customers is sincere and the outpouring of support we have gotten from our truly loyal customers recently has only strengthened that.>

No, you shouldn't view "great prices" and "stability" as a tradeoff, but I am saying as someone who has muddled through the world of "budget" and "discount" hosting, you are what you are and simply ask any web designer out there and they will tell you that cheap prices=instability generally...there are exceptions to that rule, but for now, DH is not the exception. I have followed these problems for the better half of two years...watching the support que grow to 5-10 times the size that I had ever seen in the 2 years prior and watching that support que stay around the same amount---only to be "flushed" on occassion when u folks thought things were "under control"....and this sentence: "outpouring of support we have gotten from our truly loyal customers" as if I am not ONE of those "truly loyal customers" has me truly incensed....I have news for you michael, I am indeed a "truly loyal customer", I have been putting up with this garbage off and on for the past two years, yet still pay my monthly fees in the hopes that someday the great "turnaround" will come...If you want me to send you or the servers "Get Well soon" cards, it isn't going to happen, because i EXPECT BETTER! The people that are sending you an "outpouring of support" are either webmasters who have moved their "serious clientele" to other hosting providers and have just left their "budget clients" on your servers, or they are peeps that simply have a "personal webpage with a DH referral link attached" - funny how many friends you can "buy" with $97 referral fees - I will never partake, because it would place my reputation in jeopardy to do so. There was a time 3 years ago, i would have done so for free. Don't you ever make a veiled comment like that to me again - I am more than loyal or I am just plain stupid for putting up with this!

<I appreciate your criticisms and hope that you are still around as we prove through service that stability is essential to our philosophy.>

Bravo! I am glad that you "appreciate my criticisms", if only my clientele would "appreciate the position that DH has put me in", than we would all be "The Happy Dreamhost Budget Webhosting Team", sorry, I am new to this "bohemian" thing :|

IAmAtMyWitsEnd

DreamHost has been growing incredibly fast in the past couple of years and along with that growth has been an increased rate of technical bottlenecks in our system. Some of those bottlenecks have not been handled as quickly as I would have liked but overall I believe our team is very strong and doing a great job.

We have made business decisions that we believe best serve our customer base as a whole for the long term. At times those decisions may end up at odds with the needs of a few customers but we do our best to make sure our service works for as many people as possible. We obviously do make mistakes but overall things are going very well for us.

In my opinion comparing the 'DH of today' with the 'DH of old' does not serve much purpose at this point. We are the same company I helped to start nearly 9 years ago and the founders are all intimately involved every day. The Internet has changed a lot in the past 9 years and our service has evolved along with it. We offer an industry leading service and will continue to do so for a long time to come. You have to decide for yourself and your business if our service integrates well with yours or not. We hope that it does, but understand if it does not.

We always appreciate constructive criticisms and generally also enjoy sarcastic and sardonic comments as well. We do have a slightly different approach to interacting with our customers than most of our competitors. Most people find it at least somewhat charming, but not everyone does. 8-)



- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

In reply to:

---

Why is it DH and not the other 3 webhost providers that we currently contract that have the most downtime by far?

---

What is your domain name so that I can locate your account? You are welcome to a refund if you would prefer to move to another host, as it seems that you have some that you like. We have no intention of holding you here against your will. Once I know your account, I can evaluate the machine it is on, etc, since you seem to be having more trouble with downtime then the average user.

I believe our communication with our customers stands on its own merits. It is not the majority opinion that we are patronizing or condescending. We take problems very seriously. While I disagree with your doomsday predictions, I think we agree on what is needed to make the company stronger and much work is being done in that direction.

<What is your domain name so that I can locate your account? You are welcome to a refund if you would prefer to move to another host, as it seems that you have some that you like. We have no intention of holding you here against your will. Once I know your account, I can evaluate the machine it is on, etc, since you seem to be having more trouble with downtime then the average user.>

As with other "budget" hosting, i have no problems keeping certain "budget" clientele on your servers so your account request is unneccessary, but, believe me when i say that i have been with DH for over 3 years.....I sincerely appreciate your assertion of not wanting to hold me "against my will" --- as if :p; i simply use you folks for "cheap" hosting ;) and i guarantee you that i am not in the minority there....but your comments of me personally enduring more downtime than the "average user" is quite a bit off the mark....i haven't even experienced nearly the amount of e-mail issues that several of my colleagues have experienced with your service....and i told them just what i told you, move your "budget" clientele over to DH servers; I never said that your service doesn't fit a need - just that you are better suited for budget clientele, not higher end clients that require better overall uptime...

<I believe our communication with our customers stands on its own merits. It is not the majority opinion that we are patronizing or condescending. We take problems very seriously. While I disagree with your doomsday predictions, I think we agree on what is needed to make the company stronger and much work is being done in that direction.>

It might be just me that doesn't like the "cutesie" tone of your serious announcements...that is a personal thing and not something i would use to solely judge you on....As i said, Michael, you will survive these problems, just not as a top-tier service provider as you once were and who knows maybe in a few years, you may actually regain some of that level.

IAmAtMyWitsEnd

<DreamHost has been growing incredibly fast in the past couple of years and along with that growth has been an increased rate of technical bottlenecks in our system. Some of those bottlenecks have not been handled as quickly as I would have liked but overall I believe our team is very strong and doing a great job.>

Dallas, as an "outsider", I could not possibly evaluate your business module appropriately; I can only say that many of your "technical bottlenecks" usually occurred right around the time of a "sale" or "increase of services".

<We have made business decisions that we believe best serve our customer base as a whole for the long term. At times those decisions may end up at odds with the needs of a few customers but we do our best to make sure our service works for as many people as possible. We obviously do make mistakes but overall things are going very well for us.>

Well, I am glad things are at least going "very well" for you :p...sorry, i was just working off of your admitted overall enjoyment of "sarcastic and sardonic comments"...seriously though, I really think an overall throttling of your new memberships would greatly enhance your overall business plan, as an "outsider", it often appears that DH is "flying by the seat of it's pants"

<In my opinion comparing the 'DH of today' with the 'DH of old' does not serve much purpose at this point. We are the same company I helped to start nearly 9 years ago and the founders are all intimately involved every day. The Internet has changed a lot in the past 9 years and our service has evolved along with it. We offer an industry leading service and will continue to do so for a long time to come. You have to decide for yourself and your business if our service integrates well with yours or not. We hope that it does, but understand if it does not.>

I will tell you that this is a big red flag if you indeed do not evaluate, re-evaluate, and compare the past with your current state of business...you should have already rewritten your initial business plan at least once since your inception (every 5 years minimally) and your assertions of "evolution" in terms of DH and the internet, I would remind you that "evolution" is not always a good thing....species have become extinct due to "evolving" not in a good way....your comment about being an "internet leading service provider" is far off the mark and more of a "marketing statement" as far as I am personally concerned - but, as i mentioned to Michael, "budget hosting" has it's place and i am happy with you folks from that standpoint....the clients i currently keep on your service barely even understand the web and i doubt they even check their website more than a couple times a month...they are perfect clients to keep on your service...heck i'll even go as far as stating that for "budget" or "cheap" hosting, you folks may be a leader - not sure

<We always appreciate constructive criticisms and generally also enjoy sarcastic and sardonic comments as well. We do have a slightly different approach to interacting with our customers than most of our competitors. Most people find it at least somewhat charming, but not everyone does. 8-)>

I like that you appreciate constructive criticisms and their methods of delivery, and we will simply have to agree to disagree about the whole "bohemian cuteisms" that seem to ingratiate each serious support alert....btw, don't you have some work to do? :p

IAmAtMyWitsEnd

Where do you people find out about the PROMOs?
I am a current DreamHost customer.
A few times I have wanted to recommend DH to close friends and I would like to help them save money by using a Promo code, However I NEVER see any mention of current Promos. I have even checked my own account under announcements and nothing is mentioned????

Edited by newone on 08/12/06 08:11 PM (server time).

In reply to:

---

Where do you people find out about the PROMOs?
I am a current DreamHost customer.

---

Just log into the panel, then under the Home tab, click on Rewards. That will bring up promo code and referral link info.

This is my Site on dreamhost:
http://vidcrazy.com

See for yourself if it loads or not. If it loads it may take a few minutes. It's been like this for almost 2 weeks, since my site was moved to another server. (limbo-spunky4)

In reply to:

---

http://vidcrazy.com

See for yourself if it loads or not. If it loads it may take a few minutes.

---

Your site takes ages (about 10 seconds for me) to load because:

1. The page is huge
2. It is full of images
3. It uses a table-based layout
4. It has absolutely loads of JavaScript, much of which is broken
5. It is built with invalid XHTML
6. It is built with invalid CSS
7. It uses remote URLs (beginning with "http://") everywhere

< 2 seconds for me, but I'm on an extremely fast connection. That being said...

Table-based layout and (2170 errors found over 5 pages) means that even with a fast connection, it's going to take more effort on the user's end to display the page than it should.


Check out Gordaen's Knowledge, the blog, and the MR2 page.

Yes, DreamHost is a real horror show!!

Read this article:

http://futurosity.com/231/why-dreamhost-sucks

PS. Don't let any commission seeking yahoo tell you otherwise.

Err, stop spamming your site link. I've seen many great sites that are hosted on DreamHost, and they all load quickly, which is why I am most likely moving to DreamHost.

The website "http://vidcrazy.com/" is slow because your source code is huge, and there's a huge amount of javascript. Your source code is 1655 lines long. It's not the server's fault your site is slow. Also, it loads in about one and a half seconds for me, on 5MBPS (down) cable.

Every host have problems, dh also have, but they are work for it very hard. So dh is good!

[color=red]Here[/color] are my Hosting Plan Comparision and $97 off DreamHost Promo Code