About Dreamhost

A reader asked me what I think about DreamHost, because he was gonna get it for his client. I was complaining about them previously, so I guess I needed to explain why is creativebits recommending them in the sidebar.

I guess I was very unfortunate, because shortly after I joined the shared server experienced a multiple hard drive failure, which is extremely rare. Imagine having two hard drives going dead at the same time for no particular reason. Then few days later there was a MySQL problem caused by another hardware issue. They might be related, I don't know. Few days later a contractor doing maintenance on some electrical stuff literally kicked the plug from the server, which resulted in the shutdown of the server. All this within 2 weeks.

After this the team at DreamHost decided that the server has bad karma or something, so they replaced the whole thing for a brand new system, which has been flawless since then. This was a very small incident in the perspective of those hundreds of thousands of sites they host. Their uptime is excellent. It's like 99.9% or something. :) During the whole misery they were updating all the affected users immediately. It was very comforting to know what is happening exactly and what they are doing about it. I never experienced this level of customer service with other hosting companies. The incident actually strengthened my commitment with them, which shows how well their policy of honesty and involving the customer in their daily operation worked. Nothing is to much information, when my beloved site is down, so do give me the dirty details of the electrical engineer falling of a ladder kicking the power plug.

The DH control panel is truly full featured. You can have full control over every aspect of hosting, including goodies like .htaccess, stats, streaming, one click WordPress, etc. You can host multiple domains and databases under one account. You have an on-line help channel as well, where you get personalized help within hours if you can't find an answer in the extensive knowledge base. They have a forum too, which is standard nowadays with hosting companies, but it doesn't always come with that level of helpful community that I experienced at DH.

My learning from this experience is that even if I screw up badly with a job for a client I should inform him to the very last detail as to what happened and what I'm doing about it. If I have a good service even a major crash will not affect the business relationship and it could even stregthen it.