Overall I'm pretty happy with my hosting company, Dreamhost. Tech support is very friendly, and responds to most requests within the promised 24 hours. I've asked for a ton of Perl modules and they have installed them all, globally, within a day and without demur—except for one, and they gave me good reasons why they didn't want to do that, plus gave me something of a hint how to install it locally.
Uptime is not 100%, but it has improved a lot from ten months ago, to the point where downtime is increasingly rare and increasingly brief. (Oh, I hope I'm not jinxing anything by saying that.) Server response is fast sometimes, and decent, but not spectacular, at peak hours. But then I'm not paying for a dedicated server. Instead I'm paying $20/month and sharing my machine with a lot of people. I would not recommend cheap, shared hosting at Dreamhost for a mission-critical application, but it's a very good deal for a blog. Their cheapest deal is less than $10/month if you only run one domain; I had to spring for $20 because I run several.
Hosting a number of different domains off one account is where Dreamhost excels: if you have a bunch of specialty domains, it is very easy to run them off a $20/month account, and I've done so happily for a year.
I mention all this because the annual bill is coming up to renew the sites, and in looking at the hosting plans I noticed that Dreamhost is having a sale. For $20/month you can get the code monster plan for which they usually charge more than $30. For a lot of people this may be overkill, as it allows you to host 15 domains, and 75 subdomains, store 2560 MB, and have up to 64 GB/month bandwidth (consider that this blog, by far the busiest of my sites, has never gone far over 2 G in a month, and that was one heck of a temporary spike). But as I was about to renew the already over-generous “Sweet Dreams” plan, and this didn't cost anything extra….
In the event that you should decide to host with DreamHost, please consider identifying me as your referrer so that I can collect the “reward” money. This costs you nothing and I am not going to keep the money. Instead, I will donate the reward money to a good cause.
Why not? I say you ought to keep the money. Certainly UM isn’t paying you enough to deal with all the assorted email headache
How did you initially settle upon dreamhost? There are about a zillion (and probably more) web hosts out there all with identical to near-identical pricing.
Thanks, but I like the idea that I’m beholden to no one for this, if only that I can quit any time. (And I can afford the $20/mo.). I picked dreamhost because it had a lot of positive feedback in two of the MT-related discussion groups I happened to land in when I was trying to pick a host.
I could switch my mail to one of the domains managed by DH, and may do so, although this has other costs….
Another satisfied Dreamhost customer here. I had been a customer of a Microsoft-powered hosting company until I got fed up with ASP.NET and decided to switch to PHP, and Dreamhost was recommended to me by an acquaintance from law school. I’ve been using my service to host 3 weblogs and a few small, non-mission-critical database apps, and I’m quite pleased. Server response has been brisk, downtime has been minimal, and support has been responsive.
Just for the record, the $10 plan (which I’m on) allows up to 3 domains and 15 subdomains. But if you need more domains or more capacity, the “Code Monster” package for $20/month is a darn good deal, IMHO.
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