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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