My thoughts about DreamHost

First off, DreamHost outnumbers all other services in the net when we are talking about space, bandwith and features. The cheapest package has 160 gigs, and it expands with (2?) gigs each week. The software is working pretty well, its DreamHost developed software, makes the host original, and more worthy.

However, the DreamHost design is boring and way to simple. Although its not messy, and easy to navigate, and that's what i mean is the most important thing.

Then, it happens. The thing i hate the most with dreamhost. First, it has a lot of downtime, mostly short, a few mins, but sometimes a lot longer.

DreamHost has a lack of speed, and many of my users (www.bluedotgfx.com) is complaining about it. However - i like dreamhost because it has almost NO LIMITS.

So yes - choose dreamhost if you want no limits, but slow speed and some downtime. This is factors which they CAN change, so give it a go...

[img]http://bluedotgfx.com/forum/uploads/U2-1171708005.png[/img]

In reply to:
The cheapest package has 160 gigs, and it expands with (2?) gigs each week.

Actually, the cheapest plan starts out at ~170GByte (or 200GByte if you sign-up using a promo-code) and increases by 1GByte per week. wink

In reply to:
First, it has a lot of downtime, mostly short, a few mins, but sometimes a lot longer.

DreamHost has had a fair bit of downtime recently, but in my experience this is definitely not the norm. Since being with DreamHost, overall up-time has been very good on my sites, on par with other shared hosts out there.

In reply to:
DreamHost has a lack of speed

I think this depends a lot on which physical server you are on and who you are sharing it with. I have no speed issues on my server ('Bixel').

Mark

In reply to:
However, the DreamHost design is boring and way to simple. Although its not messy, and easy to navigate, and that's what i mean is the most important thing.

I don't think so. I'm able to manage my site with DH panel. That is the most important thing to me.

In reply to:
First, it has a lot of downtime

I agree that this happends recently. But it was because of the maintanence. I do not think this happens very often. Otherwise this forum will be full of complaint.

In reply to:
DreamHost has a lack of speed, and many of my users (www.bluedotgfx.com) is complaining about it.

The speed may vary in shared server. DH will manage the users on different servers to balance the load of different servers. so far so good. If you want reliable speed, you can also apply dedicated server in DH.

In reply to:
i like dreamhost because it has almost NO LIMITS.

I agree.

"Actually, the cheapest plan starts out at ~170GByte (or 200GByte if you sign-up using a promo-code) and increases by 1GByte per week. "

Oh foo, thats quite bad guessing by me hehe...
Well i know that dreamhost had an official downtime recently, but what bothers me is those small downtimes in a few minutes, and on the server im settled on, its jumping off pretty often.

[img]http://bluedotgfx.com/forum/uploads/U2-1171708005.png[/img]

In reply to:
what bothers me is those small downtimes in a few minutes, and on the server im settled on, its jumping off pretty often.

If this problem persists, it might be worth lodging a support request via the panel, detailing the time and duration of these small outages. I am sure DreamHost support will be interested in taking a look.

Mark

when i visited your site it seemed to load up pretty fast so it just might be net congestion at times that it may seem slow.

also i havent noticed any down time except for the ones that they tell us about. could just be the server you are hosted on.

so far i love DH for all the flexibilty that i have and great service

I'm still getting very slow response time for my sites running on dreamhost, even after they said they moved my sites suppose to be a 'faster' webserver.

I did a DNS testing and found out the dreamhost's DNS has very slow response time ( something like 300ms and the average should take no more than 20ms).

I even open a ticket to the support. To my surprise, one of the support responded me to go get a dedicated server instead of shared server.

I am not very happy with the response I recevied. If you guys can checkout my sites and let me know how fast you get rendered, I would really appreciated.

Here are my sites:

www.mccainforwhitehouse.org
www.hillaryforwhitehourse.org
www.obamaforwhitehouse.org

Yes those were very slow when I just tried them. All 3 of yours are quite slow. The slow part is resolving the DNS I think too because once it clicks through, your site actually loads fairly quickly.

But wouldn't a DNS problem be affecting all of us? Doesn't DH only have about 3 DNS servers that they use? So if it is affecting him, shouldn't it be slowing everyone down as well?

very verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry slow for me too. right now my sites are loading fast. i have my issues with slow times during peak times.

to tell you to get a dedicated server is BS. a normal shared sever that worked right would be great!

I tried to open your sites. It is really slow to open them.

I'll suggest you to send a ticket to DH support if you have this problem consistantly. DH will take a look at your script and mysql queries. If it's necessary, they may move you to another server.

Sounds like you need to fix your DNS servers:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain=www.mccainforwhitehouse.org

Definitely not an issue with DH, from what I can see.

www.mccainforwhitehouse.org Loads quick enough, works OK
www.hillaryforwhitehourse.org Doesn't load at all (Firefox can't find server)
www.obamaforwhitehouse.org Loads slowly, doesn't work so well.

Sounds about right to me. Dreamhost has it tuned just right. wink

Well, I suggested to the support with a ticket and email to inform about the DNS resolve slowness. The response I got was to use a dedicated server for my sites. It's really annoying since I try to explain to them with sound, technical facts and be part of the process, but yet they refuse to remedy this. What can i do??

I wonder who is in charge of the company's support, since the response I got from the support just doesn't been very professional about it. The person I got the response from ( Mike J) indicated there are about 400-600 other sites running on the same server where my sites are located. It sounds like they want my sites go really slow in order to force us to purchase a dedicated server.

Still not hear from the company's higher up to help us to remedy this :(

"I tried to open your sites. It is really slow to open them.

I'll suggest you to send a ticket to DH support if you have this problem consistantly. DH will take a look at your script and mysql queries. If it's necessary, they may move you to another server."

yes, they did move us to another server, but this one is getting worse and even slower...:(

It's not an issue with DH man. It's the DNS servers you are using, which are NOT DreamHost's DNS servers.
So you need to either change your current DNS servers to something more reliable, or contact your registrar (assuming you're using their DNS servers) and ask them to do something about it.

Please see my other comment in this thread for a link on info about WHY your DNS is so slow.

" It's not an issue with DH man. It's the DNS servers you are using, which are NOT DreamHost's DNS servers.
So you need to either change your current DNS servers to something more reliable, or contact your registrar (assuming you're using their DNS servers) and ask them to do something about it."

The proper way to analyze this is thru this link here, which you can see why is DH:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnstime.ch?name=www.mccainforwhitehouse.org&type=A

Considering you just changed the nameservers back to DH, I find this quite funny.
Before they were listed under a completely different set of nameservers (wish I had saved it!).

The report you listed though has always been highly inaccurate, and is in no way (nor has ever been) the "proper" way to analyze issues with DNS.
Just as an example, I ran a test on my domain 5 times, and I got between A- and F results (B-, D, A-, F, C).
I also don't use DH's nameservers, so that report isn't really saying much about either of our sites. Use the main one as I suggested before: http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain=www.mccainforwhitehouse.org

It explains exactly what kind of problems you might be seeing with reaching DH's DNS servers.

If your site is just loading slowly though, it could be due to the recent issues with the file servers that was just reported a little while ago: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/03/01/file-server-issues

Hi,

To response your statement:
"onsidering you just changed the nameservers back to DH, I find this quite funny.
Before they were listed under a completely different set of nameservers (wish I had saved it!)."

I never changed the nameservers back, is always the same one. Also, anyone would know you can't just populated any domain names update so quickly ( like you have suggested).

The tests have been consistenly showing the 310ms range for the past 2 weeks. If you are so interested, you can monitored everyday and post your results here so we can all know :))

The fact of the matter is I never got any proper response how DH would fix this issue, which is the at the heart of this matter.

Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about.

Yes, sometimes changing DNS servers can take up to 72hrs to propagate, however most changes usually happen well before then. My experience has been within 3 hours.

Your issue of "310ms range" is absurd considering the source.
Did you even READ what dnsstuff's page said about your domain? Clearly not, or you would seen this:

In reply to:

Note: If your results seem poor, it is most likely due to the 'no glue' issue. Do not blame your DNS hosting company. If you change your NS records to be ones on the .org TLD (eg ns1.example..org rather than ns1.example.com), it will fix this problem. This problem only affects the speed of initial DNS lookups on your domain.

So even 310 is pretty damn good, considering that dnsstuff reports automatically add 200ms onto your time. That means 110ms at most, and the last few times I checked your domain I was getting 280ms (so 80ms).
That's about the same as my .com domains, which are not using DH's DNS servers.

I have no idea what you expect DH to tell you.
It's certainly NOT a DNS issue though.

"Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about."

son, I wouldn't go that far. Been doing sysadmin for the past 15 yrs now and also have participated a few online bbs/forums. The oldtimer can easily smell a "rat" a mile away:)

I have responded several updates to dreamhost and request for remedy on this issue. Believe me, I hope they will "tell" me something, or else about 8,000 others could get little annoyed.

Thanks for been so active on my thread:)

Anyway, as always, the best it to separate services :
Registar - DNS - hosting

With a backup solution ready (at least for the 2 last).

If one fail, you can move really fast.

For your suggestion on:
"Anyway, as always, the best it to separate services :
Registar - DNS - hosting"

This is exactly how i approach our sites here at dreamhost. Been doing the sysadmin for 15 yrs or so now, have seen too many and also learned alot of hard lessons...:)

Anyhow, I will update any feedbacks I got from dreamhost here so others could see and get some insights.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Well, to my surprise after 24 hours I got an email today saying everything fine:

"Hello,

I took a look at your server, it is running normally. I'm not seeing a
terribly slow load time on your site either. Is it possible a script in
your code that's taking longer than it should? Or possibly people are
hotlinking your pictures so it's causing your site to go slow?

I noticed you are using Joomla to power your site! I did a check on your
server and everything seems to be functioning fine there. I would
reccomend taking a look at this page fore some tip on how to make your
Joomla installation more efficient and fast!

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,50278.0.html"

Well, the support team never provide any stats to proof everything fine. I keep given them the ping and DNS timing stats to show the problems, along with my sites rendering so slow that our members are getting annoyed.

Also, the feedback indicated we are running Joomla, which is not the case for the 3 sites I submitted the ticket for.

Overall, another one of those "general reply" email without any detail to remendy our sites slowness.

Cursiouly, everytime the reply were sent by a different support rep. I wonder if they ever look at the history to see what's the issues/problems been reported.

Am I safe in assuming you've done a traceroute? Maybe there's a slow link to your area. (just a guess)

Wholly - IS NOT MY PROMO CODE. Even worse, I don't get any credit for it. Use WhollyMindless for full credit. I'm really disappointed in someone.

He's been a "sysadmin" for "15 years", so I'm sure he "knows" all about doing that too. tongue

I'd be surprised if it was a routing issue anyways, as I also experienced some fairly slow load times with his sites (1 of which didn't even load at the time).

Anyways, I've already given him a link to the issue in slow loading times, which I'm 99% sure is the case with his site as it was with mine and many other people's. If he wishes to ignore this fact, then that's his loss. smile

Yeah, I guess I forgot that part.

Wholly - IS NOT MY PROMO CODE. Even worse, I don't get any credit for it. Use WhollyMindless for full credit. I'm really disappointed in someone.

My thoughts about DreamHost