DreamHost actually honors their limits!

I know that many potential customers are shocked with the generous allotment of space and bandwidth offered by DH. You must be thinking "This has got to be a joke, either the servers are slow as turtles or these guy's have a hidden catch." or "This must be a bait and suspend tactic!".

Well, so far, I'm on the 10th week of my plan and everything has been smooth save for a few days of the slashdot effect. I use a couple dozen GB of space, and usually about 50%-75% of my bandwidth allotment. Speeds are fantastic, almost always above 350KB/s downloading from the East Coast.

See, unlike hosts like SurpassHosting.com and HostICan.com, who oversell even more than DH, DH actually honors their agreement and as long as you're not hosting warez or using so much CPU that you crash the Apache service, you won't have your account kicked. At HostICan, two of my friends signed up for the unmetered package as a backup server and after mirroring around 50GB of data, their accounts were terminated because HostIcan's TOS does not allow use of their servers for "file storage". At SurpassHosting.com, I had an account and used it as a mirror server. After a slashdot effect, Surpass terminated my account because their TOS doesn't allow more than 30 simultaneous http connections. So unlike DreamHost, which used apache limits on my site during the slashdot to keep the apache service and my site alive, Surpass simply chooses to terminate any account that becomes a hassle to them. Their tech support is much much faster than DreamHost's, but they have absolutely no clue as to how to optimize apache service or setting up modules for apache to limit connections and etc... I suppose that their superb tech support respond time comes from the fact that they simply choose to kick away all users with serious challenges.

The bottom line: DreamHost oversells, but their servers can probably handle the load and their admins are knowledgeable enough to optimize stressed servers efficiently, thus, DreamHost honors their limits. Also, DreamHost is reducing the limits daily in an effort to reduce overselling, so in the future, server performance will only get better.

Share your opinions on whether Dreamhost is a good host or not!

Edited by diwu1989 on 03/26/07 03:55 PM (server time).

In reply to:
DreamHost is reducing the limits daily in an effort to reduce overselling, so in the future, server performance will only get better.

I don't think the daily reduction in disk space and bandwidth quota will have any measurable impact on server performance, as I imagine the vast majority of DreamHost customers, new and old, use only a small percentage of the quota their plan allows. I suspect the real reason behind the reduction was to make DreamHost less appealing to the tiny percentage of potential customers that do intend to use all their quota.

As you said, space and bandwidth are not the only considerations on a shared server, other shared resources, such as CPU and memory, are important too. There have been quite a few reports of (apparently) badly optimised sites being asked by DreamHost to reduce resource usage, but DreamHost have shown that they are willing to work with the customer to isolate the cause of the excessive usage and get things under control.

Overall, if your site(s) are not adversely affecting others on your shared server, then you should be OK.

In reply to:
Share your opinions on whether Dreamhost is a good host or not!

Personally, since being with DreamHost, I have generally had an excellent experience. Network reliability does seem to have suffered over the last few months, with my site(s) being down far more often than they were in the months prior, but hopefully things are back on track now and we can look forward to the same excellent reliability I experienced for the majority of my time here.

Mark

Wow--that's a lot of data you're transferring! Out of pure interest--what's your website? I'd love to see how you're managing to use more than 0.0001% of your bandwidth quota (I try so hard and always fail!)

Well I'm at the other end of the scale, my usage is less than the amount that the bandwidth increases by each week. It is nice to know though that if i ever do use a lot more I shouldn't have any problems.

Overall though very happy with the service n the first few weeks I've been on dreamhost. Better than the previous ost I used.

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In reply to:
Out of pure interest--what's your website?

animedreamer.info

latest unlicensed anime and THE place to get high quality stepmania packs.

unlike your site, I get over 4500 page views daily, so just the joomla pages themselves would eat up a couple gigabytes of bandwidth monthly if not more.Edited by diwu1989 on 03/26/07 07:51 PM (server time).

I'm mostly a low utilization player but the high limits make me feel safe against having a massive overage charge should a miracle occur and people actually become interested in what I say in my blog. smile

I am new to DH and I am in China. Speed connecting to this forum is excellent. However, speed connecting to the DH Web Panel is not so good. It is usually quite there. Hoped that will be improved. I will test in Hong Kong when I come back there tomorrow.

It's the same thing if you install punbb vs phpbb :
phpbb is always slower than punbb (on the same server)

the panel may access to too many database to be fast

The panel is constantly a performance limitation. The continued DB maintenance (such as tonight's) will hopefully help. I also hope that during these that they are trying to change the tables to help performance.

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Now that I am in Hong Kong, the speed is quite better than in China. Although it is still slow compare to that in the forum. I think the main problem of my panel slow problem is regional problem.

I've been with dreamhost now, for about 3 months, and all in all, I have to say I am happy with the service. I've had 2 short unplanned outages since signing over, one being shortly after I signed on where for a couple hours in the middle of the night, the server was configured incorrectly, but they got it fixed right away, and when they had the servers drop about a week ago. When I've needed to use their customer service, the response was fast and helpful.

Some people I know recently had their site, hosted by dreamhost, DDoS'ed, and dreamhost performed fairly well for the situation. Unlike other hosts, who would have dropped them, Dreamhost simply disabled the site during the botnet barrage, and after the botnet had been called off, reenabled the site, going on with business as usual.

My site has great uptime, nice speed, and mostly trouble free, which all in all, makes me happy.

DreamHost actually honors their limits!