What is Digg?186 Comments
- retral, on 10/15/2007, -8/+137Honestly, I paid $9.99 for a year of hosting with an included domain and it was a hell of a deal. I used it mostly for image & file hosting, and it once got dugg and pushed like 1.4TB of bandwidth in one day for a Wii video. I can't say I would want to pay like $10 a month for the hosting, but I can say that (less than) $1.00/month for hosting that was almost completely stable and had plenty of bandwidth/space to suit my needs was GREAT.
- admirabumblebee, on 10/12/2007, -16/+93I wish there was a bury button for "The author is a moron".
It'd fit ever so well. - onepostwonder, on 10/15/2007, -10/+64After a long, long time lurking, I started an account at Digg just to post this message.
I've had a lot of experience with website hosting. You don't pay $9/month for hosting on a shared server and honestly expect unlimited connections. Elliott Back is an insurmountable idiot for thinking otherwise.
"[...] after doing some investigation into their servers, Elliott Back discovered that they're overloaded to hell. And upon politely pointing this out to Dreamhost 'support' staff, they shut down his account!"
Actually, they're not "overloaded to hell". I currently have 13 full domains served from Dreamhost, and my experience has been excellent. Support turnaround has been decent, too. Not as fast as other hosts I've used, but it's been more than acceptable.
And they didn't shut down his account for pointing out that their servers are overloaded. They shut down his account because his site was using too many connections and when they warned him, he essentially ignored them. After that, he threatened to sue.
Again: Elliott Back is an idiot. Dreamhost had every right to limit his connections. If he didn't want this to happen, he shouldn't have hosted on a shared server.
Inaccurate story, idiot writer. About par for Digg, now. - inactive, on 10/23/2007, -8/+60dreamhost is fine for low performance needs and low budgets. anyone who wants digg proof servage at cheap prices has unrealistic expectations.
hostigg is a great place to discuss this... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -11/+56I have never had a problem with them...
running my of the same user name...since 05 - Arkonnan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+38> The phrase "Dreamhost Sucks" is probably going to enter Internet folklore after this
Ehh, nah, I don't think so. You're sorely overestimating your weight in the interweb community. Now if it had been Bruce Perens or the janitor from Scrubs who was complaining, maybe.. - Thorlord, on 10/12/2007, -4/+37I use dreamhost.. and i have had really no problems with it.
its always up (at least when i check it, it is, but after reading this article i bet its offline a few times during the day apparently)
ive never had trouble logging into their control panel website that lets me manage my websites.
its somewhat fast. its OK but hell for what i pay its fairly good.
while my website is fairly small and probably going to stay that way, its fine for the way im using it.
then again, if i was that guy, i probably would have moved on to another hosting service quite a long time ago, if my website was my primary source of income i would have dropped them after the daily outages.
i am looking for alternatives, and would love to find a good hosting plan for other businesses i deal with who look for reliable hosting plans, i dont feel comfortable recommending dreamhost to them. - floppypond, on 10/12/2007, -5/+33I've gotten 3 million hits on my image uploader in the last week, serving over 400GB. Dreamhost has kept it up (although, I'll admit, it's time to move to a dedicated solution).
Dreamhost has provided me with excellent support and services, but they are obviously not a performance host, or once designed for high-load websites. But of course, you get what you pay for (why would you ever expect otherwise?) - wshs, on 10/12/2007, -4/+31Decent for $5000? Where do you buy your servers? The Franklin mint? I've spent $1000 on a server that has survived several Slashdottings in the past (haven't had the luxury of a Digg yet), and has handled denial of service attacks that make Slashdot/Digg effects look like nothing. If someone has to spend a fortune to handle Digg/Slashdot effect, the problem isn't with the hardware. It's with the administrator. There's only one exception, and that's saturation.
- RautenkranzMT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27you know, actually, i've gotten more than 2000Gb monthly transfer. granted, that's because i generally host rather large source archives, which are served very often to a rather small number of connections.
there is, in fact, a massive difference between bandwidth usage and number of connections. 1000 people download 1Mb vs 10 people downloading 100Mb is two different stories. - aemaeth7, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23It's a bit presumptuous to say that this will enter "Internet folklore"... this isn't nearly worth mentioning at all. Like #gharding said, 8usd/mo really gets you how much performance?
- yvovandoorn, on 10/12/2007, -4/+25$5000 for a decent web server!? This isn't 1999.
We spend maybe $2400 tops on a Dell or HP (corporate's idea not mine) servers and they only go down when we tell it to (new kernel, apache or php patch/update). - wastern, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20I paid $97 for 2 years of service. Thats $4/month if you break it down. I had some pages up here and there, but mostly just use it as an online backup for my files. I started with 100gb which they doubled to 200gb and it grows by a gb every week, so even if I somehow fill it up I'm fine as long as I don't create more then 1gb of data/week I need to upload..which won't happen
I haven't really run into any major issues. I emailed tech support a couple times, they were quick to respond and very helpful. I subscribe to their RSS feed for maintenance, nothing has hit my servers yet, but those that do show up there seem to be taken care of quickly (hardware failures and such)
For someone just looking to host a little personal site or that wants to have a ***** ton of online storage I'd recomend them. I've had good luck and its cheap as hell. I could get a 200gb hard drive for backup, or I could get 200gb online storage with regular backup that I can access from anywhere in the world....and have the option for setting up a webpage, blog, wiki, or whatever else to boot. Doesn't sound to bad to me
If you're running mission critical stuff, pay more, but if you can deal with some down time here and there then who cares. Now and then I can't get to my FTP, but I wait a little while and can connect. No big deal for what I'm using it for.....and for $4/month I can't bitch too much. Thats less then a decent beer at the bar. - smackhero, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20i've been using dreamhost for about 7 years now and have always recommended them to others. they're actually not that bad of a host most of the time. they have pretty decent customer service--very knowledgeable and helpful staff and respond to service requests within 12 hours. what attracted me to them initially was the value of their hosting packages--fairly economical, but provide all the necessary features for a professional web host (SSH, unlimited subdomains, php, perl, mysql, etc.).
in my experience, their uptime has always been fairly good as well, which is why i recommended them to my boss. we host several band sites on a shared hosting ecommerce package, and our online store is also hosted on the same account. but during last year our record label's hosting account started experiencing some major downtimes and for several weeks i was unable to really do my work because ftp/ssh was so slow. at first i thought it was just a temporary problem that they were sure to fix quickly, but when it dragged on for 2+ weeks it started making me look really bad as i had recommended dreamhost to my boss and told him their service was unparalleled.
it got to the point where one couldn't even load our online store half the day (during peak business hours). our daily sales dropped about 95% and started to really hurt our operation. we had gotten in touch with customer service before and were told that it was a temporary outage due to hardware failure--but it should not take more than a week to fix a hardware failure. finally, i just wrote a really angry letter telling dreamhost that the situation was unacceptable and that if they didn't rectify the problem immediately we were going to have to move to a different webhost.
the technical problem seemed to be localized with a few particular servers as my personal hosting account, which was on a different server, seemed to be fine, as were many other sites hosted on dreamhost. luckily, customer service got back to me and said that they would refund us last month's bill and waive the current and following month's fees as well, and apologized very politely (considering the acerbic e-mail i had written to them). the situation got a little better site stability was still bumpy for about 2 more weeks.
since then there have been few issues and their quality of service has returned to normal though. i was really saddened when all this happened as they were a company that i had put so much faith in and really admired for their quality of service, professionalism, as well as the value they provided for their customers. if you read the dreamhost newsletter, you'll see how dedicated their company is to their customers as they're always improving their services and bringing better value to their customers. they constantly drop their prices, but always give existing customers even greater discounts so you don't feel ripped off. there is a strong sense of community amongst dreamhost users, and part of this is due to the level of interaction and dedication from the dreamhost team. also, if you read the newsletter, you get a sense that this is a very young and energetic company, who are not afraid to be candid with their customers, joke around and have a good sense of humor, while still provide a very trust-worthy hosting service.
and since the founders of dreamhost were from the claremont colleges around here, i do kinda feel a local connection to the company. i'm still a loyal customer and expressed my sadness regarding the drop in their quality of service in my complaint to their customer service. i'm not sure if these new widely publicized complainst against them are valid (a few are rather questionable and very petty complaints). i mean, one blogger complains about dreamhost disabling a script on his site cuz it was exploited to send spam and advising him to contact the authors of the script. this is perfectly standard practice in the tech world as far as i know. i mean, why should they provide support for software they didn't develop. i'm glad they take a very cautionary stance against spam as it affects everyone hosted on dreamhost if their ip block gets blacklisted. also, the blogger seems rather incompetent and whiny (and even tries to get people to sign up with dreamhost using his promotional code that would give him a referral bonus).
people have to realize that dreamhost has a huge amount of customers, and it's natural for such a company to accrue a certain amount of customer complaints. but overall, they have very good customer satisfaction and are far better than the average hosting company within that price range. honestly, if you want competent people dedicated to their work, dreamhost is a very good choice. if you ask most dreamhost users, you'll see that these complaints are in an extreme minority. - mrhahn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+201&1 is farking terrible. Their cancellation process requires you to fax in a signed form...who uses fax in this day and age? And the customer support is just painful to interact with - most of the time I just got copy/pasted replies from their useless FAQs.
- wshs, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18@Y0tsuya
I'd hardly consider a 1u rackmount a "PC." What, pray tell, is the difference between a "PC" and a "server," other than its use? And what's a "server grade" SCSI card? How is it different from non "server grade" cards, other than warranty and price? After you ask your Dell sales guy, come tell us. Not sure about anyone else, but I sure as hell want to know. - briangig, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17whether you have had problems or not, that server is way underpowered and way over sold...you cannot deny that....1200 users and 4GB RAM...
- moiety, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17I've had four stories front paged on Digg, and I've never had an issue. I'm actually rather surprised by Elliott's situation... I've always found Dreamhost's service and performance to be excellent, especially when you consider how inexpensive they are.
- DeathtoG4, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19Im curious if Dreamhost employees or PR firm are writing some of these comments...........
- fac3less, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16Their ratings say otherwise. Fairly decent:
http://hostjury.com/reviews/DreamHost/ - latour, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12I'm also with dreamhost, they have good services and all but it's not for high traffic sites. With that said i'm moving my sites next month to a dedicated solution. Does anyone recommend any good places to get dedicated hosting?
- AkshayGenius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+123 million hits? Whats your site?
- clokwise, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13I recently spent nearly 3 months just trying to transfer my two domains away from Dreamhost - and the runaround I got from support was so bad it was comical. Finally I got one support guy there who actually read my complaint and acted on it and the issue was resolved quickly. But for two months it was sheer hell.
- gharding, on 10/12/2007, -16/+27Uhh.. duh. You're paying $10/mo for hosting and decent webservers start at around $5,000. What exactly did you expect?
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -10/+20Dreamhost is fantastic for its purpose. This guy is spreading useless *****. He's probably funded by a competitor.
- gnawph2, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14Dreamhost is entry level hosting for entry level sites.
Attempting to run a photo sharing/uploading/whatever service on dreamhost server is just stupid. - Miniman, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13I have a similar story, someone uploaded somthing onto my dreamhost account, dreamhost shut down the account, and took my domain. To this day they will not transfer my domain or release it, i have contacted icann several times and they do nothing.
- andrei, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10That article is misleading; just because there are 1200 users on that machine doesn't mean there are actually 1200 customers on that machine. Even on the cheapest plan, each customer can create up to 75 users. I, for example have 36 users because I like to host each domain/subdomain in its own user account (for security purposes).
- Amything, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11I use Dreamhost. And yeah it is really slow but it is so damn cheap when you consider that you can have several sites on 1 hosting plan.
- Rhino2, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9
(disclaimer: I have a few dream host accounts so do friends of mine):
1) Dreamhost IS overloaded on their cheap accounts. But what you expect for $10 a year?
2) It's not that badly overloaded
3) It can handle a Digg and/or Slash effect without going off line (provided your not running some ***** word press blog)
4) Has tons of bandwidth for stupid cheap (see #3)
5) For Price/Payoff - it's one of the best deals around. Compare it to any other $10 a year web hosting service and it's leaps and bounds a head of them.
6) It's great for what it is, but don't expect dedicated hosting for that cheap. - Tarnum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Great for low end sites, yes. But if your site becomes popular, you are eff-ed, they cant' handle growth.
I frequent a site hosted there - ficwad.com. Fairly standart site, nothing excessive. However, they are always down at peak times, because of host's database overload.
With webhosting, you get exactly what you pay for : ( - ElectricGrandpa, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9It seems to entirely depend on which of their servers you're on... The company I work for(doing web development) has now dropped using Dreamhost for any sites we make. Often the sites are low-traffic but 100% up-time is critical, and Dreamhost gets *nowhere* near that. We've probably hosted 10-15 different sites with them, and almost all of them have had absolutely unacceptable amounts of downtime.
- fac3less, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7GoDaddy is not only horrible but they disable domains at their whim :/
http://hostjury.com/blog/5/godaddy-suspends-domain-by-request - seiha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6i've had serious downtime with them and servers go down. i got support reply in less than 2 minutes once my site went down. But you do get what you pay for. If I had the money i'd go dedicated at sago/layeredtech/pronto for bargain dedicated hosting. but for now, dreamhost will suffice.
- blackjack75, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6As much as a I hate the current performance of dreamhost (going several times a week in my case), Dreamhost was awesome in 2004-2005. The support was excellent (and still is AFAIK).
It's only in 2006 that performance went down the drain in my case. I don't use it everyday, but I know every time I use it I have slowdowns / unreachable pages. Since I use Mantis to maintain a list of bugs this is really_ really_ annoying, much more than when my other websites go down for a few minutes and I never notice. - jasonprussell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+71&1 is a ***** Joke.
I had a site hosted with them a few years ago, they tried billing me $297 for their BASIC plan for a year. When I brought the error to their attention, they said they'd fix it. When I didn't pay the incorrect bill, they shut-off my account and locked my domain so I couldn't transfer to another host until I'd pay the $297 (around 200 more than it should have been). ***** Them.
They also have WAY more users per server. How do you think they afford those multi-full page ads in several magazines? - holzp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8You mean Dr. Jan Itor?
- paulius, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6You get what you pay for. Simple. How can you give terabytes of bandwidth to your custommers without overselling? And that's exactly what they do.
On the other hand, I always lose custommers to DreamHost and other "too good to be true" hosts, people are attracted by the "massive" offerings and the "savings" that they get. This means that their business technique works.
So, I don't know, maybe I should rethink my way of doing business, start overselling servers and give people a lot of unexisting resources. - MBroil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I tried Dreamhost with a low-volume personal site (wordpress + gallery for photos) as a test before moving any of my "money sites" to an unproven host. Downtime like mad, as in several hours every day for two weeks. Then a good week. Then another bad week. Followed by a good week. Followed by...
I was out of there.
I now have my sites on a VPS, with video and other large files warehoused at Amazon S3, which @ $0.18/GB doesn't look as cheap as the DH/1&1 crowd on the surface, bu - gharding, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I personally use Rackspace, Pair, and ServerPronto.
- cylon99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I had a dedicated server with Dreamhost that went down all the time. No number for support either, so my box could be down for days at a time, however long they took to respond to email.
I left them long ago and went to Liquidweb - http://www.liquidweb.com and they pickup the phone everytime I call for help. Been with them for several years now and couldn't be happier, they genuinely care. - ucg1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Although Dreamhost has great pricing, I too have had some of the problems described: e-mail problems (sometimes e-mails getting lost that were sent to me), slow performance (all the time), outtages. The e-mail problem being the most serious but it hasn't happened in a while. I'll probably switch to something better at some point.
- headzoo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9To be fair, I payed $9.99 for a full year of DH hosting. I don't expect much, but damn.. what a price.
- limewood, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@PsycoEwok
I'm with LayeredTech now and I don't recommend them. The prices may be good but the support has been less than stellar. I'd look else where. - blackjack75, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Cheapstake or not, they still promise A LOT. If you can't reach what they promise without getting your account closed, it raises serious questions. I would rather go back to the times they promised less for the same price and availability was better in my own experience.
- wshs, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8One does not install a 1u for its expandability, but for its physical size. But you knew that. If I needed a machine where I'd expect expansion via that many hard drives, I'd go for 5u or SAN. However, you still haven't explained the difference between a server and a PC. Considering the cost of hardware with the warranty ("server grade"), and the same sold without ("desktop" or "PC"), it's more cost effective to purchase the latter. Hardware issues covered by such a warranty are so far and few between that it would be cheaper to replace the part at cost. If the quality of hardware should change causing it to be cheaper to buy the warranty, I'd consider a new brand for that particular type of hardware.
- fac3less, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Except dreamhost offers more bandwidth and space than even two of my dual xeons offer together...
Woops! I guess they should offer more realistic packages if they want to get people on their service with realistic expectations :/ - clickfire, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I'd like to read the article but apparently it's been taken down.
Overselling has been debating ad nausem on the hosting forums. Not all hosts oversell. So if you don't want that risk, don't host with an overseller. - robotz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5The article is OTT, but not wholly inaccurate. I found their performance last year to totally suck in almost every way, constant downtimes, constant control panel issues, constant network issues. In the end I dumped the account and wrote off the domain, not wanting the hassle of transferring. They oversell in the worst possible way, and more worrying than that, it appears their network admins don't have a ***** clue how to run a stable web host. The unidentified router issues causing outage for so many people last year proves this. They grew too big, too fast, and didn't (and possible still don't) have the internal knowledge to back that up. Never. Ever. Again.
- DonCarcharo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I've been using DreamHost as a backup repository for my main webserver and for my client backup files (which are over 200gb in size). For the price it can't be beat. However I'd NEVER use them to actually host a live site. My server is down just as much as it's up and their overall flippant attitude towards network and service issue just annoys me.
But again, you get what you pay for. To that point I'm a happy customer. -
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