Search

Search this site:

Dreamhost: Honest about mistakes. And that's _good_!

I have been maintaining several minor sites hosted at Dreamhost for about a year. And since over one month ago, my personal website is with them as well. And I must say, I am very pleased with them. No, not (well, not only) because they run Debian on their servers, nor because they are probably the cheapest game in town (I paid something like US$200 for a basically unlimited package , for three years), but because of their degree of responsability and personal service. Responsability? Aren’t they well-known for their network outages? Why, yes, of course - Today’s example is paramount: Somebody edited the wrong firewall entry, and all of Dreamhost became unavailable. In general terms, Dreamhost has a great blog-like structured page where they inform customers of every network or server problem they have - No, you don’t have to dig in to understand why your site is down: They bring it up to you. Upfront. And in a familiar, very non-formal style. Whenever I have submitted an issue to their request tracker, I get prompt reply. Does it always solve the situation? no, by far. I’m often told to, basically, go screw myself if I really need such feature… But they are straightforward with that, they are good, nice BOFHs (if such thing ever existed), and they don’t present you with corporate-minded studies backing up their solution. Yes, I know that in their servers, it’s plainly their way or the highway. But hey, that’s what I paid for, right? That is what wins my heart. Yes, Dreamhost is no good for many, many tasks - including, for example, anything that requires a real RDBMS (forgodssake, they offer MySQL but not PostgreSQL, damnit! WTF!?), nor any legendary five-nines reliability. But they are great for the vast majority of the Internet sites’ needs. They even exceed what a simple person like me would ever dream of. So, my hat off to you guys. Again. (No, and I’m not getting paid or discounted on services because of this blog post. Although maybe I should! ;-) )

Comments

Anonymous 2008-03-09 18:18:04

So you think that when they

So you think that when they accidently charged their customers millions of dollars that they shouldn’t have and responded with a picture of Homer Simpson they were behaving responsibly?


gwolf 2008-03-10 10:37:39

I also agreed there!

It was a fuckup - Yes, I’m very glad I was not affected by the fuckup. But hey - They are run by humans. Yes, many people lost confidence in them - but they reacted just the way I’d like them to react. Accepting the fault, publicly and promptly, and handling it as people, not as drones. I really appreciate that, in times of crisis, they have enough humour to look for a nice Homer Simpson image. I’d rather be served by Homer, and not by Smithers.


patux 2008-03-10 11:19:11

their blog

I guess their blog must be hosted on an external dreamhost network to keep his users informed with all the problems they run into. :-)


vicm3 2008-03-09 18:32:34

Not the cheapest

I think the cheapest with shell access are hostgator and lunar pages, and I think the cheapest are 1&1 and goddady.

Anyway I had since 2005 my photo gallery, anime forum and other non critical things and I’m very happy. I for curiosity tried vpslink and slicehost for vps (both very good), but to leave a lot of sysadmin work DH has proved to be very good.

The FW issues remeber me last year when they added uplink and got a major outage :D http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/10/18/major-networking-issues/

It’s really interesting to know all the things that happen’s on the background without having to dealing with them.

Categories