Dreamhost vs. Others.

Thank you guys for sharing you odd experiences with other providers and nice with DreamHost! I was on hesitation about DreamHost to host my first ever website.I'm just a affiliate now(although inactive) and i sometimes write about different hosting providers in forums.Now i'm confidently can say i'll be a DreamHost member in near future and also say it to my forum friends.But still a hesitation about the decreasing of start up disk space and bandwidth.Everyday its decreasing!Is it temporary? And do you know the last date of the offer of 50% discount on 'code monster' plan? Please.........Thanks.

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it tells you how many websites share the same IP address as you, telling you how many other websites are on the same managed server.

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No. It tell you how many domains are hosted on a single IP.

For some hosting company, it say how many ones are on a single server (roughly a quad-xeon at dreamhost, all are not the same).
And this kind of company have usually several different IPs for the same kind of hosting.

But for some other hosting company, they use a single IP for all domains (or all ones within the same plan), with dozen servers behind.
For instance, www.google.com use only 4 IP, but they have thousands server behind.

Also, especially about godaddy, all websites don't have the same size. you can easily host 5000 domains on a single server if it's only a parking page.

In brief :
A single IP != a single server
It can be many ones behind.
And in the inverse, there can be multiple IP for a single server.

So, don't judge a hosting company for the number of hosted domains/IP ;-)

They are not parked pages. Ive seen parked pages with 37-60,000 sites on a server. Those are completely different. These are websites in full production like Johnsonsaudio.com and things like that. Basically since you like code so much put it this way

if webSites >= 1000
not good
else
stay

I dont like to share my server with others and have no intentions of it. Yes google might have 4 ip addresses but Google is no in the same ballpark or even universe as GoDaddy or DreamHost. Google does things that astonish us all everyday. GoDaddy has an office in Arizona which is probably kept at 90°C cause there are 500 servers stuffed in a room with 3000 websites on each server.

Yes their might be a difference between ips and servers but the system operates the same and will judge DreamHosts ip addresses the same as GoDaddys

GoDaddy = 3,000 websites over (4) servers = 750 each
DreamHost = 4 websites over (1) server = 4each

4 != 750

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Yes their might be a difference between ips and servers but the system operates the same and will judge DreamHosts ip addresses the same as GoDaddys

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No the system doesn't operate the same, as Moua said, you can not make direct comparisons in this way, as different hosting companies will allocate IP addresses in different ways.

For example; At DreamHost, each physical server allocates IP addresses from a large pool. In-fact, if you check the IP addresses allocated to your domains and sub-domains, you will likely find most of them have been allocated different IP addresses, even though the domains are hosted on the same physical server.

Mark

so explain the reason for 4-10 second 'lags' in opening my websites with godaddy and no lag with dreamhost...same code let me mind you. and its xhtml 1.0 strict compliant 4-8kb per page.

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so explain the reason for 4-10 second 'lags' in opening my websites with godaddy and no lag with dreamhost

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This could be due to a slow server or saturated network at Godaddy, or network latency between you and them, but it still has nothing to do with your domains/IP address argument and the comparison you're making between them and DH.

But how can you know there is only 4 servers behind a single IP for godaddy ?
ANd what kind of server it is ?

I worked in a hosting company, and they use low-end servers, with a single IP for each different plan.
The most popular plan have hundreds servers behind.
If you make 100 different http request on a website, they are (more or less) randomly made by different servers.

Everything is managed with huge cisco switchs.

This is i think a good choice, because if a sever fail, everything still working for everyone, just sightly slower (but when you use dozen servers, you don't notice it).
And if more people (websites) coming, we just had to add more servers.

Files are on netapp fileservers.

It's not mean you get a fast nor slow hosting with this kind of architecture.
It depend on how many server you use for all you clients, and how do they use them on average, because this is real shared hosting, where all servers (at least in the same plan/functions) are equally shared for all domains.

There is redundancy for about everything : servers, hard drives on netapp, switches, peering & transit links, electrical arrival (3 different ones... if one fail because of maintenance or not, you still have power !), batteries if there is really no electric power, and diesel generator in the last choice.

With this kind of architecture, except human error, you don't have any downtime.
Just a few seconds if a switch or a link fail, the time to automatically change routes (with OSPF).

They even have backup of netapps in a different place.
They had a project to make everything up back in 48h in a different place if something serious happen in the main location. But i'm not sure this emergency plan is off the paper.

But you can really make this only if you host really a lot of websites.
DH could do it, they have the minimal size for.
But it's a lot of work on the start, and you must change about everything if you didn't do it when you start hosting.


To go back on dreamhost :
I'm on it because it is ok for most of my needs, and i don't have critical website that must be up 99.999% of time (that's less than 9H downtime a year)

But about performance : there is many more factors than the number of websites/IP (and even on server) on average.

Godaddy is maybe slow, but definitely, it's not because they use an multiple server/IP architecture (if they does).

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so explain the reason for 4-10 second 'lags' in opening my websites with godaddy and no lag with dreamhost...

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I didn't say that GoDaddy wasn't over-crowding their servers, they may indeed be doing so, I don't use them, so I couldn't say.

I was merely pointing out that using the number of websites on a particular IP address as an indication of the number of websites on a physical server is not particularly accurate.

Mark

Im not trying to be problematic but GoDaddy has been slow since day 3 having them. My tracerts come back with dropping off after hitting GoDaddy, and their ISP. Yes I know firewalls exist that drop packets but they spike from 4ms > 4ms > 90ms > 180ms > then the big 1800ms > and back to the standard 4ms.

I called in with this problem and they blatently said we have 4 servers for each 'server' and depending on how busy a specific site is, depends on which of the 4 servers its on.

The tech support told me directly. Then said its my websites code is the problem.

Edited by RHalverson on 03/10/07 02:17 PM (server time).

All the two posters above you are trying to point out is that a comparison of how many domains point to the same IP address is unreliable (at best) for determining how many websites a server is hosting.

The easiest way to see this is that you can purchase a unique IP address from just about any host for an extra couple bucks per month. Now if you queried that IP address through whois.sc it's going to show up as ONLY your domain(s) on that server, when in reality you're on a shared hosting plan and your website is sitting on the same server as dozens of others.

Nobody is arguing that GoDaddy's hosting is any good. Odds are they really blow, like most companies that use web hosting as an upsale opportunity and not as their primary business.

1and1 used to be entirely corporate (big business web hosting only). When they moved into the personal & small business sector a few years ago they had a "free for 3 years" hosting deal. I signed up for it. I hated their control panel, the sql architecture was fubared, and the hosting was nothing great. I never tried their support lines, because I had better hosting elsewhere. Just tried it because it was free.

Edited by harley on 03/10/07 04:47 PM (server time).

and do not forget that the server space and bandwidth grow every week. I like this because this is indeed fair to us. The capacity of disk storage increases 30% every year. If you have a 120GB hard disk now, the price will drop to 50% by next year. And it is not fair to us to pay the same amount for the same server space every year. In DH, they increase the space us --> Good!