The worst Experience with Dreamhost

I just wanted to let people know I have had the worst experience with dreamhost.
Here is what happened, I have a website that makes very good money, it was running out of bandwidth at my former host, I decided to move it to dreamhost as they offer large bandwidth, my site was about to go down and i needed the hosting setup fast. Last tuesday I signed up for hosting $79/month, before I signed up I was speaking to a sales person through email, they said I will get the setup email within an hour of payment and I could start uploading files.
I never received the setup email, I contacted them dozens of times and still , no email. They said they never received payment. I paid through google checkout, I contacted google checkout, they explained to me that dreamhost did receive payment and I had to contact them. Again I did, still they say they did not receive payment, the payment was taken out of my bank acct so I know it was sent.
after Multiple emails with no response I again contacted google checkout to inform them of a possible fraudalant sale. I sent dreamhost an email about 20 minutes and just got a response that I was refunded. So basically.....
they did receive the payment but never sent me the setup email. I still have never received the setup email.
Google checkout probably contacted them about a fraudalant charge and they were quick to refund me.
Sounds like they were trying to scam me.

I would not recomment them to anyone.

1. They have absolutely no phone support , they do not answer emails or support tickets quickly if at all.
2. After extensive research about dreamhost I found that there network is very slow, especially sql / php sites.
3. They want your money, once you give it to them they will do nothing for you.

This is just my opinion because of my recent experience.

victor

In reply to:
1. They have absolutely no phone support , they do not answer emails or support tickets quickly if at all.
2. After extensive research about dreamhost I found that there network is very slow, especially sql / php sites.
3. They want your money, once you give it to them they will do nothing for you.

I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties. Evidence suggests that you have had an extremely unusual experience, because most people are extremely happy with DreamHost. Let me address your three points.

1. Shared hosting companies that offer telephone support are rare nowadays. The cost of providing such a service would make it impossible for DreamHost to offer their services at such competitive prices. I have found the panel-based support system to be more than sufficient for my needs, and I manage a significant number of domains for myself and a number of clients.

2. I utilize PHP and MySQL for most of the sites I manage, and I can find no evidence to support your statement about the DreamHost network being slow. In fact, I have found the speed of the network to be significantly above average for a shared network environment.

3. Recent threads on this forum have suggested that DreamHost has had some trouble verifying the identity of customers. They have been forced to incorporate some quite draconian anti-fraud measures to combat things like credit card fraud. There have been cases of "false positives" with this system, and it is possible that your account application has fallen victim to this circumstance.

If you believe you have been mistreated, I recommend that you document your problems and pass them on to DreamHost so that they can check into it for you. I know that their reputation is very important to them so I'm sure their quality control department would like to hear from you. I suggest you use their contact form and mention "quality control" in the subject field.

Yes I have contacted them regarding this.
The part I do not understant is that they continued to say they never received payment for my hosting.
Yet when I cancelled and notified google checkout, they processed a refund ?

I am sure there are people that have had great experienced , I am just letting you know mine and how disappointed I was. I now got a Dedicated server which I am very happy with.

make any sense ?

First of all, thank you for sharing this info. However, the fact that this hosting company provides a venue for dissatisfied customers like your self to air their grievances tells me something about their integrity if not their perfectiveness.

Second, If I´m not misunderstanding a dedicated server costs at least 15 times of the cheapest option available here so you sound like someone who bought a Honda, did not like it and say: I´m now driving a Ferrari and liking it very much!?

With regards to point 2:

I have not been here long enough to judge for myself, but I have seen a few comments about the speed of databases here. I would suggest that maybe it is slower because the DB server is not the same machine as the web server, so pages with large amounts of queries may not get processed as quickly due to the queries ahving to be sent elsewhere, and the results sent back. I know on some web applications I have seen, they can run up to 700-800 queries per page sometimes, which runs lightning fast on the same machine, but maybe not when it is a different one.

As I say though, I haven't seen any evidence of this yet, so I'm not really sure.

In reply to:
I would suggest that maybe it is slower because the DB server is not the same machine as the web server

Actually, the reverse should be true in most cases. A database server and a web server should be optimized differently. If they ran on the same machine, they would interfere with each other to a certain extent. Also, having a dedicated database server is better from a security standpoint. Poor PHP/MySQL performance in the DreamHost setup is almost always related to a bad scripting, and sometimes this is exacerbated by a poor database structure.

In reply to:
The part I do not understant is that they continued to say they never received payment for my hosting

Usually it takes some time for DH to approve your account. From what we know, DH is very careful with credit card fraud. That is why they prefer Google Checkout. If the paymennt does not go through, they will apend your account first. However, they will keep your records in their system so that no one else will take away your domain name in DH.

In reply to:
they processed a refund ?

Yes, DH guarantees 97 days money days. That is the word. They will do a refund for you when you close your account (if you already paid).

Note that they will refund you all but not the domain name.

Hi Victor,

It seems that you have had a bad experience, this kind of thing is bound to happen from time to time with a company the size of DreamHost, given the number of account applications they must process per day.

However, it most definitely should not be taken as an indication of what the majority of applicants can expect. In my experience, the sign-up process is usually handled very smoothly.

In reply to:
I would not recomment them to anyone.

That is your choice. I however, *do* recommend them to others and will continue to do so. smile

In reply to:
1. They have absolutely no phone support , they do not answer emails or support tickets quickly if at all.

Maybe I am strange, but I actually prefer email support to phone support. I dread each time I need to call my ISP, as I know it will invariably result in being put on hold for long periods. As for support response times, I find that this is directly related to the severity of the issue. My casual queries do take a fair while to be answered, but important things tend to be addressed within a couple of hours.

In reply to:
2. After extensive research about dreamhost I found that there network is very slow, especially sql / php sites.

I can't agree with this statement at all. I find my sites on DreamHost are plenty fast enough. Obviously, a lot will depend on which server you end up on, and who you are sharing it with, but my particular server is fine.

In reply to:
3. They want your money, once you give it to them they will do nothing for you.

I will note that the only billing error I have experienced with DreamHost since being with them was in my favor. Of-course, being the honest person I am, I notified them and they fixed it up. tongue

In reply to:
This is just my opinion because of my recent experience.

Which you are entitled to. However, as others have pointed out, the fact that you can freely voice that opinion here on the DreamHost forums should tell you something about the company.

Mark

Like i said, just my opinion,
and for the comment about a honda and ferrari, fact is I paid 79$ to start an acct at dreamhost, dedicated server is only 150$/mo, not even twice as much.

Sounds like you got a decent deal. Congratulations.

Dreamhost isn't the right answer for everyone.

Wholly

yes I did. And I understand some people may take offense to my comments about dreamhost, It is only my experience, I am sure dreamhost has been great for some people, I may have just been unlucky, hopefully no one else will have to go through what I did with dreamhost.
best of luck to everyone with there hosting.

In reply to:
I understand some people may take offense to my comments about dreamhost

I don't think anyone took offense, what you related in your post was *your* experience, and as such, you have every right to post that in this forum. I think that others that posted their own experiences were merely interested in providing a balanced view and showing that not everyone's first contact with DreamHost is as problematic as yours seems to have been.

In reply to:
best of luck to everyone with there hosting.

You too, I hope everything works out well for you. smile

Mark

i think the process of transitioning to a new host is going to be a pain-intheass for anybody. Its lot of details to get right. and thats not including the sign-up process which sometimes has snags.

I think you're mostly angry because you've lost some money in the few days that your site was offline. I would suggest that you consider yourself blessed that you've made a lot of money i the past with your website.

Cheers!

I don't claim to have any specific answers here, but I transitioned four sites from GoDaddy to DreamHost during a month when my Webmaster was on hiatus. I'm a tech writer and talk show host, but I'm not an expert Web coder.

I did, however, anticipate possible glitches in establishing new accounts, so I allowed extra time for everything to work before migrating my sites, which include MySQL databases for WordPress, along with vBulletin and SMF message boards.

With proper preparation, everything went pretty well. The account I set up with PayPal took a bit longer to clear, but a letter to support got that resolved.

I also needed a tiny amount of hand-holding for the database migration, but everything worked out quite well. Certainly the sites went back up with few noticeable glitches, and those were wiped away within a half hour or so.

However, I retained my hosting accounts at GoDaddy for roughly one to two weeks (depending on the site) before canceling them. I didn't want anything to go down, beyond the normal issues of switching to a different DNS setup.

I would certainly recommend that anyone who wants to move a site they depend on for income should prepare for the worst, and even the possibility you'll have to go back to your old host, if only temporary, before things settle down.

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
www.macnightowl.com

$79 was your initial payment. Your dedicated server will cost you $1800 per year, and your DreamHost account, assuming it was level 1 on a monthly payment plan, would only cost you $170 per year. I signed up for the Level 1 plan for a whole year with a discount code my friend gave me, and guess what? I only paid $23 dollars for the first year. That's quite a bargain, don't you think?

I'm not flaming you, just telling you that you made a pretty bad choice of getting an entire dedicated server. DreamHost is far superior to every other host I've used, and that's quite a handful. You're paying fifteen times as much monthly for your dedicated server. Oh well, you went with them instead, so you might as well enjoy editing all sorts of configuration files for different system services and occasionally getting your box exploited if you don't configure it securely.

Edited by victort on 01/19/07 04:54 PM (server time).

The worst Experience with Dreamhost