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besson3c · Jul 17, 2006, 05:12 PM

Originally Posted by dialo

Not really. There are maybe 10s of hosts in the same class as dreamhost and they each have differences. A year ago there were even fewer that offered similar services.

You mean hosts going for a high volume, low cost business model? Hosts offering a large assortment of services? Both?

Chuckit · Jul 17, 2006, 05:17 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

Five others that offer Windows-based solutions... As far as I'm concerned, there isn't much variance here.

Mac, Windows, Linux (with a plethora of GUIs), BSD (also with tons of interfaces), Solaris…only one of those is Windows-based.

besson3c · Jul 17, 2006, 05:49 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Mac, Windows, Linux (with a plethora of GUIs), BSD (also with tons of interfaces), Solaris…only one of those is Windows-based.

The BSDs and Solaris are included under the umbrella "Unix", which was in my list. My point still remains.

Chuckit · Jul 17, 2006, 05:54 PM

OK, so that's only several other options? Wow, you're right, our tiny installed base is the only game in town.

Why are you seriously trying to argue that Mac OS is the only operating system out there? That's plainly wrong.

besson3c · Jul 17, 2006, 06:06 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

OK, so that's only several other options? Wow, you're right, our tiny installed base is the only game in town.

Why are you seriously trying to argue that Mac OS is the only operating system out there? That's plainly wrong.

??

What are you trying to argue Chuckit?

My point is that there are far more hosting options than there are platforms. In relative terms, OS X is one of the only games in town.

Why is this point so contentuous?

nonhuman · Jul 17, 2006, 07:54 PM

Hmm, for whatever reason my dreamhost hosted pages are extremely slow right now. :/

Chuckit · Jul 17, 2006, 08:06 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

??

What are you trying to argue Chuckit?

My point is that there are far more hosting options than there are platforms. In relative terms, OS X is one of the only games in town.

Why is this point so contentuous?

The point is, Apple has made some pretty big errors in its time, but that doesn't disqualify its products from being generally good. If you're going to say "How can Dreamhost be good if it had 24 hours of downtime?" you may as well say "How can Apple be good if it had a horrendously destructive installer script for one of its programs?" The fact is, even the best companies occasionally have problems.

besson3c · Jul 17, 2006, 08:14 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

The point is, Apple has made some pretty big errors in its time, but that doesn't disqualify its products from being generally good. If you're going to say "How can Dreamhost be good if it had 24 hours of downtime?" you may as well say "How can Apple be good if it had a horrendously destructive installer script for one of its programs?"

I don't know anything about what actually happened except what was reported here. However, if it was indeed a disk going bad, they should have had something in place to deal with this sort of issue in a more timely manner. Considering how this is the bread and butter of their business and they are basically setup soley for this sort of purpose, it just seems foolish to give them a free pass, which is all I'm saying.

The problem could have been caused by some weird proprietary hardware voodoo that warranted on-site support, I'll grant that.

Perhaps I was being too hard on them. However, I don't understand why everybody goes ga ga over this company. I'm sure they provide good, or even great service, but there are so many hosting companies to choose from, I don't know what everybody seems fixated with this one.

Chuckit · Jul 17, 2006, 08:33 PM

There are lots of search engines. Why do you think everybody fixates on Yahoo and Google?

besson3c · Jul 17, 2006, 08:41 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

There are lots of search engines. Why do you think everybody fixates on Yahoo and Google?

There actually aren't that many anymore. There are a few insignificant search engines other than Yahoo, Google, and MSN, although many of them get their search results from other providers such as the DMOZ, etc.

Unless the playing field has changed since I last looked around, there are dozens of significant hosting companies with a significant user base around.

Eug Wanker · Jul 17, 2006, 09:05 PM

Originally Posted by nonhuman

Hmm, for whatever reason my dreamhost hosted pages are extremely slow right now. :/

They were slow for me too earlier today.

P.S. http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2006/...ems-are-worse/

IceEnclosure · Jul 17, 2006, 09:09 PM

ha, crap

dpaanlka · Jul 17, 2006, 09:10 PM

Dreamhost is officially down for me at http://forums.system7today.com, and so is http://www.dreamhost.com itself....

!!!! what is going on over there?

it's 8:10 PM CST here in chicago

Eug Wanker · Jul 17, 2006, 09:16 PM

Dreamhost is now very slow for me. Ftp access seems fine though.

dialo · Jul 17, 2006, 10:34 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

There actually aren't that many anymore. There are a few insignificant search engines other than Yahoo, Google, and MSN,

And ask jeeves and teoma...

dialo · Jul 17, 2006, 10:35 PM

Originally Posted by dpaanlka

Dreamhost is officially down for me at http://forums.system7today.com, and so is http://www.dreamhost.com itself....

!!!! what is going on over there?

it's 8:10 PM CST here in chicago

Works for me now, and fast, 9:34 CST chicago

nonhuman · Jul 17, 2006, 10:37 PM

Originally Posted by dialo

And ask jeeves and teoma...

Teoma is now part of Ask. And I'm pretty sure they just use Google.

dialo · Jul 17, 2006, 10:37 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

The BSDs and Solaris are included under the umbrella "Unix", which was in my list. My point still remains.

Well, if you are going to group fedora with solaris you might as well add OS X, too.

Eug Wanker · Jul 17, 2006, 10:39 PM

Now back to fast for me.

dialo · Jul 17, 2006, 10:41 PM

Originally Posted by nonhuman

Teoma is now part of Ask. And I'm pretty sure they just use Google.

Teoma has its own crawler and even though it's owned by Ask and Ask uses teoma for some results, the two are fundamentally different.

besson3c · Jul 17, 2006, 10:45 PM

Originally Posted by dialo

Well, if you are going to group fedora with solaris you might as well add OS X, too.

?? Why would I group Fedora with Solaris/Unix when it is a Linux-based system?

dialo · Jul 17, 2006, 10:46 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

Unless the playing field has changed since I last looked around, there are dozens of significant hosting companies with a significant user base around.

Having a lot of customers doesn't make a host good. I don't know when you last looked around, but as of a year ago it was rare to find a sub-$10/month hosting package that had all of the features of dreamhost. And, yes, hosting packages change significantly every few months due to competition. I'm no dreamhost fanboy and move around from host to host (right now I also have accounts with 1and1 and lunarpages), but dreamhost offers a really good set of features and tends to have them before other companies.

dialo · 10:58 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

?? Why would I group Fedora with Solaris/Unix when it is a Linux-based system?

You tell me:

Originally Posted by besson3c

What other choices are there other than OS X? Windows, and Linux/Unix? There are a 290432830942384 other hosting providers...
Not a great comparison... Apple is virtually the only player in town, Dreamhost is one of hundreds.

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Mac, Windows, Linux (with a plethora of GUIs), BSD (also with tons of interfaces), Solaris…only one of those is Windows-based.

Originally Posted by besson3c

The BSDs and Solaris are included under the umbrella "Unix", which was in my list. My point still remains.

Listen, I don't want to argue. I just don't think that dreamhost having trouble for some users (not all, mind you, my account's been fine) automatically voids their good packages and service. I think that's similar to the point Chuckit was making.

besson3c · Jul 17, 2006, 11:02 PM

Originally Posted by dialo

Having a lot of customers doesn't make a host good. I don't know when you last looked around, but as of a year ago it was rare to find a sub-$10/month hosting package that had all of the features of dreamhost. And, yes, hosting packages change significantly every few months due to competition. I'm no dreamhost fanboy and move around from host to host (right now I also have accounts with 1and1 and lunarpages), but dreamhost offers a really good set of features and tends to have them before other companies.

I don't doubt that they offer a lot of features at a good price.

However, the hosting companies are into these number games, trying to come up with the most impressive techno-babble:

- 99.99% uptime

- 1293812093 gigs of bandwidth (if every customer utilized all this bandwidth, the hosting company would go out of business)

- every programming language in the book

etc.

Many websites that are not hosted on a dedicated server have only modest needs, but these hosting companies know they can lure people in with all of this hype.

Really, at the end of the day it comes down to whether or not they have competent administrators, good security practices, a reasonable amount of resources, good customer service, and a decent price for what you get. The rest is just all words, and words are cheap. Also, don't forget that for every additional bell and whistle a provider offers, there is just one more service that can be remotely exploited if the admins are not on top of their game.

Granted, it's extremely hard to gauge just how good a hosting company is from the get go, as many of these qualities are revealed over time.

paul w · Jul 17, 2006, 11:33 PM

NOW MY FRICKING DREAMHOSTed SITE IS DOWN, ALONG WITH ANOTHER'S.

grrrrrrrr.

IceEnclosure · Jul 17, 2006, 11:51 PM

and mine is back to fast!

paul w · Jul 18, 2006, 12:03 AM

They gave you my server, prolly.

IceEnclosure · Jul 18, 2006, 12:05 AM

I hear they're using the old Pentium III that 'NN used to use.

dialo · 12:32 AM

Originally Posted by besson3c

However, the hosting companies are into these number games, trying to come up with the most impressive techno-babble:

- 99.99% uptime

- 1293812093 gigs of bandwidth (if every customer utilized all this bandwidth, the hosting company would go out of business)

- every programming language in the book

etc.

Many websites that are not hosted on a dedicated server have only modest needs, but these hosting companies know they can lure people in with all of this hype.

Great! That's exactly what I want!

After years of being constrained by spotty features, low space and low bandwidth, this model is fantastic. In fact, they are able to offer those features precisely because not everyone uses them. For those of us who use them it works great. For those who don't, they are still paying less and less every year. Everyone wins.

Why would you complain about that? Do remember what hosting packages were like 2, 4, 6 years ago? It's so nice to finally never have to worry about shelling out a ton of $$ if traffic peaks. It's nice not to have to shop around for a plan that has just the right set of features for each project. It's nice not to have to spend $60/month just to have a decent plan.

CharlesS · Jul 18, 2006, 02:06 AM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Let's compare:

• Apple once released a program that deleted entire hard drives by mistake.
• Dreamhost once went down for 24 hours.

Which do you think I care more about? Do you think that one stopped me from using the company's products?

Well maybe I'm just reading too much into people's remarks, but I'm kind of getting the vibes that this isn't the first time this has happened. I do remember reading about some huge downtime issues the last time I was looking into a new web hosting provider, and coincidentally enough, I hear about them again and they're having downtime issues.

At any rate, from subsequent posts in the thread it seems like the problems are still going on, so that downtime has lasted a lot longer than 24 hours. Which is unacceptable. How would a web host not have backups?

Originally Posted by dialo

Not really. There are maybe 10-30 hosts in the same class as dreamhost and they each have differences. A year ago there were even fewer that offered similar services. Most hosting companies competing with dreamhost just recently added multiple domains per account, and most of those still limit them to around 6.

I would never use a domain provided by a web hosting company. Get a domain from a third-party with no interest in your staying with a particular web host, like GoDaddy or something. Then you can switch your host at any time, and just tell the company providing your domain to point it at the new host's name servers and you're all set.

MaxPower2k3 · Jul 18, 2006, 07:30 AM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

At any rate, from subsequent posts in the thread it seems like the problems are still going on, so that downtime has lasted a lot longer than 24 hours. Which is unacceptable. How would a web host not have backups?

Well, here is the official story of what happened, according to Dreamhost:

Originally Posted by DreamHost

Today’s network problems were caused by not 1, not 2, not even 3, but 4 separate issues.
First, one of our older distribution switches decided to give up on life.
After replacing it with newer hardware, everything ran just fine for a couple hours. Then, it decided our network topology had changed (apparently due to a different default configuration since the old days when it was deployed), and started dropping a good percentage of traffic.
This issue also affected another switch that some of our file servers plug into, so customer data was unavailable to a good portion of our hosting servers.
Consequently, one of our more active mail servers tried to dump all of the backed up email all at once, saturating some of the network that it’s on.
Once these configuration issues were resolved, one of the network interface cards in our main firewall machine died, requiring a quick swap.

Eug Wanker · 10:24 AM

This sounds like a pretty good reason why DreamHost is cheaper than average. Nonetheless, it's fine for my purposes, and I'm not surprised they had this meltdown considering I've had big outages from other providers as well. I'm not willing to pay the big bux, since the sites I have are purely for personal use.

That said, it's still lame, and if it is a frequent issue, I'd switch.

I would never use a domain provided by a web hosting company. Get a domain from a third-party with no interest in your staying with a particular web host, like GoDaddy or something. Then you can switch your host at any time, and just tell the company providing your domain to point it at the new host's name servers and you're all set.

I didn't bother checking... What are Dreamhost's policies on domain names they provide? I can't find specific mention of strings-attached type of clauses for transfers. (Even if they had Draconian rules for transfers if I switched, I'd just change the domain name, cuz like I said it's just for personal use.)

dialo · Jul 18, 2006, 12:03 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

I would never use a domain provided by a web hosting company. Get a domain from a third-party with no interest in your staying with a particular web host, like GoDaddy or something. Then you can switch your host at any time, and just tell the company providing your domain to point it at the new host's name servers and you're all set.

I was referring to hosting multiple domains on one account rather than needing to get a new hosting account for each domain. So, for example, rather than needing a separate $8-$10/month account for each website, you just get one $8-$10/month account and host as many websites as you want. For some time Dreamhost has had the ability to host unlimited domains, and only recently have most of its peer hosting companies added the ability to host multiple domains, although many are limited to 6-10 per account.

besson3c · Jul 18, 2006, 12:05 PM

Originally Posted by dialo

I was referring to hosting multiple domains on one account rather than needing to get a new hosting account for each domain. So, for example, rather than needing a separate $10/month account for each website, you just get one account and host as many websites as you want. For some time Dreamhost has had the ability to host unlimited domains, and only recently have most hosting companies added the ability to host multiple domains, although many are limited to 6-10 per account.

I wish all hosting companies offered this service, it's really not a big deal to setup another DNS entry and virtual host declaration.

Perhaps smaller hosting companies (like my own) tend to offer this more frequently than the bigger players, I don't konw.

MaxPower2k3 · Jul 18, 2006, 08:19 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

I wish all hosting companies offered this service, it's really not a big deal to setup another DNS entry and virtual host declaration.

Perhaps smaller hosting companies (like my own) tend to offer this more frequently than the bigger players, I don't konw.

I don't think it's the effort of setting up a DNS entry, I think it's more just trying to get you to buy more hosting accounts for multiple sites (or to make sure you don't buy an account and share it with your friends). But dreamhost doesn't care, and I'm fine with that

CMYKid · Jul 18, 2006, 08:51 PM

Anybody that thinks "losing face" for downtime is worth much of anything, let alone one meeeelion dollars is obviously a bit over-enamored with themselves, but mission-critical sites that I didn't want to even begin to worry about go up on Hostway for me. They get pinged every five minutes and I've never had a downtime report. I was a little worried when they merged with the #1 Adult hosting provider that they'd get slow and spotty but not so far.

Only thing I REALLY dont like is the fact that, for a world-class host, they don't offer one single multi-domain option. SOoooo...even if I'm willing to PAY for individual accounts, which I am, I cant manage them all from one central login. Annoying.

Doofy · Jul 18, 2006, 09:11 PM

Originally Posted by CMYKid

Anybody that thinks "losing face" for downtime is worth much of anything, let alone one meeeelion dollars is obviously a bit over-enamored with themselves

Corrected via PM.

IceEnclosure · Jul 18, 2006, 09:19 PM

that pig cartoon must be makin' mega moola!

Eug Wanker · Jul 28, 2006, 04:58 PM

My site is down. This is what www.dreamhoststatus.com had to say, as of a few minutes ago:

"There has apparently been another power outage at the datacenter. One of the generators caught fire and they were taken offline. We’re waiting for more information and we’ll post here as soon as we hear anything."

IceEnclosure · Jul 28, 2006, 05:13 PM

lol

mine's still up!

DayLateDon · Jul 28, 2006, 05:17 PM

I've never had too much trouble with DreamHost in my 18 months with them so far, but the past couple of weeks have been pretty bad. My POP mail accounts are intermittently unreachable for stretches of time. (They were down when I started to post this message, but now they're back up. My web site is still out, though.)

Maybe they'll have a happy-system-failures-six-months-for-free compensation promotion.

nforcer · Jul 28, 2006, 06:15 PM

Yeah, the problems don't affect everything./everyone It is kind of annoying that they've had so many problems as of late, probably the worst period I can remember as long as I've been with them. It's good that they report them or acknowledge them though.

Eug · 12:14 AM

Bass-turds. My site is STILL down.

Dare I say it?!? DreamHost is worse than .mac.

I guess you get what you pay for. I paid something like $10 for the year.

EDIT:

Hmmm... Not even my sig pic works. Lame.

EDIT Again:

Heh. I guess I shouldn't complain. Lots of bandwidth used this month. Not bad for the ~$1/mo it costs me.

Eug · Jul 29, 2006, 11:39 AM

And it's still down.

besson3c · Jul 29, 2006, 12:47 PM

At what point does reliability trump feature set and price?

starman · Jul 29, 2006, 12:59 PM

$1/month

IceEnclosure · Jul 29, 2006, 01:45 PM

I feel bad for Eug though, mine hasn't gone down since whenever I started this thread

Eug Wanker · Jul 29, 2006, 09:48 PM

Hmmm... What happened was the main directory's name got changed to the name of my domain somehow when the servers went down. That's why nothing was loading after the servers went back up.

In other words, it was eugbanana.com/files/ ---> eugbanana.com/eugbanana.com/

Strange.

nforcer · Aug 1, 2006, 10:39 PM

They posted about their terrible month here. They accept the blame. Looks like datacenters in CA generally suck, though.

Eug · Aug 2, 2006, 12:00 AM

Nice that they explained it, but it really does seem like you get what you pay for.