A few questions from the UK

Hi, I've been looking for a new home for my array of sites..i came across DH after looknig for some Icons to use in a multimedia app I`m currently building..so anywho`s...

I`m in the UK and was wanting to know a few things before I pitch my new tent.

downstream speed - what would be the average D/S speed from DH? obviously it`s dependant on the connecting users connection..but what is the theoretical speed?

Access times - i`ve seen a thread or two about access times and was wanting the opinion from a few of you, both long term and short term, regarding the access time you have experienced. I`ve just tracert`d to dreamhost.com and to digisample.org (which i found in the acess times thread ;)) and the DH IP gets a nice 13hops and digisample.org gets 23. which is expected since it is going to/from the US..but clearly the routing is slightly weird;

In reply to:
what would be the average D/S speed from DH? obviously it`s dependant on the connecting users connection..but what is the theoretical speed?

As you say, the speed you see will be highly dependent on many factors, but I have seen speeds in excess of 2MByte/s when transferring from DreamHost to a remote host using wget.

In reply to:
Access times

That second trace route you posted sure does look strange. I see fairly direct routes when tracing to my DreamHost server, with overall latency of just under 200ms, which is considered good from my part of the world (south-eastern Australia) to the west coast of the United States.

In reply to:
is the FTP reliable?

It has been for me. I don't normally upload extremely large files, my limit is usually around 20-30Mbyte, but I have not encountered any FTP issues since being hosted here.

In reply to:
what is the service like? technical and customer support, etc...

To be honest, it seems to vary. I personally have always received rapid responses to my support queries, normally receiving a reply within 12 hours, but others on the forum have reported waiting a few days for responses.

In reply to:
can i host .uk domains?

Yes, you can host .uk domains without an issue, you just can't use DreamHost as the registrar for such domains. To host them here, you simply configure the name servers at your registrar to point to the DreamHost name servers.

Mark

dreamhost is in los angeles.

You must always add about 150ms from europe to go there (and go back).

7 80 ms 214 ms 219 ms te-2-4.car2.Paris1.Level3.net [4.68.111.253]
8 37 ms 39 ms 36 ms ae-0-51.mp1.Paris1.Level3.net [4.68.109.1]

In reply to:
downstream speed - what would be the average D/S speed from DH? obviously it`s dependant on the connecting users connection..but what is the theoretical speed?

I can only quote my typical speeds which have been 200-500MB/s. I can give you the URI of a fairly large file to test with if you want.

In reply to:
Access times - i`ve seen a thread or two about access times and was wanting the opinion from a few of you, both long term and short term, regarding the access time you have experienced. I`ve just tracert`d to dreamhost.com and to digisample.org (which i found in the acess times thread ;)) and the DH IP gets a nice 13hops and digisample.org gets 23. which is expected since it is going to/from the US..but clearly the routing is slightly weird;

It looks like all the "weirdness" is within the Level 3 network itself for traffic from London to Los Angeles. I'm not familiar enough with the SLAs between Level 3 and Virgin Media or between Level 3 and DreamHost (or their data center provider) to know what is considered an acceptable routing...

In reply to:
is the FTP reliable? I`ve been with many, many UK/EU hosts who`s FTP`s die halfway through uploading...which is testing at best.

I've never had a problem with FTP - though I always use SFTP or SVN+SSH and I don't know whether SSH connections have different characteristics than FTP connections.

Mark has given you better answers for your last two questions than I could so I won't reiterate and bore you!

In reply to:
It looks like all the "weirdness" is within the Level 3 network itself for traffic from London to Los Angeles. I'm not familiar enough with the SLAs between Level 3 and Virgin Media or between Level 3 and DreamHost (or their data center provider) to know what is considered an acceptable routing...

In other words, it all looks like it's due to whatever routing algorithms that Level 3 uses, since it looks like the routing from your machine through Virgin Media to Level 3 is "normal" and from Level 3 to DreamHost is "direct".

Level 3 Communications is an internet backbone and provides a Tier 1 network.

Uhhh.... in other words, for all practical purposes, I wouldn't worry about those routings.

thanks for the replies :)

In reply to:
I can give you the URI of a fairly large file to test with if you want.

if you wouldn`t mind :D

a few other questions;
which method does DH use for it`s PHP setup (CGI, FastCGI, Apache Module or 'other')...and what is the "post_max_size" and "upload_max_filesize" set to, and can these be changed if they are too small? - i know the apache module setup allows for .htaccess overriding, but i`ve recently found that (fast)CGI doesn`t.

thanks!

A few questions from the UK