This blog is hosted at dreamhost.com. On the whole I've been happy with its low prices, although as this blog grows I chafe more an more at the limits on processing times imposed by the virtual host controller on my shared machine. I am no longer able, for example, to kill off more than a few spams at a time via mt-blacklist; I can't rebuild the site without having a crash except on the dead of night on federal holidays. It can get frustrating. But it is cheap. And the real problem is that movable type and some of my favorite plugins are rather resource-intensive.
Nevertheless, I do find it a little worrying to see the management at DreamHost crowing about how easy it is to make money off folks like me. So much money that they are going to hire a bookkeeper.
PS. If you are looking for very cheap and on the whole reliable blog hosting, tell them “froomkin” sent you and I get a kickback.
Not every dirt cheap webhost is as stingy on the processing power. You might want to shop around a bit. I’ve been quite happy with PowWeb. They’re about the same price as dreamhost but I can rebuild my site and kill spam without a problem.
Argh. And this weekend was my planned move to Dreamhost (already bought and paid for months ago–I’d have kicked back had I known), to avoid some of the speed /size issues you describe. Ah, well; eventually I’m just going to have to self-host. Actually, someone over at fundable had put together a shared server collective, which I think is a great idea, but I don’t want to be stuck administering a machine again, particularly when it’s not just me I have to be concerned about :(.
Funny people. I used to run paultopia on dreamhost until their constant outages drove me nuts — that must’ve been back when their repair guy was snortin’ the blow all the time.
Actually, uptime is not at all bad; not at the level for a mission-critical commercial application, but not bad at all. And the bandwidth and storage limits are very generous. It’s just the limit on the amount of processing time you can use at any one moment (there’s no cumulative limit) and/or the hogs I share my machine with….
If I used a better-behaved blogging tool than MT 2.6 I might not have this problem. And even there, I am fairly confident that the culprits are two of my favorite plugins.
I think I left right at the worst point, sometime just after they stopped taking support calls over the telephone and went to e-mail only. That was the last straw for me, and it was back in, god, 2000? I’m sure it’s much better now.