No hosting company is right for everyone, but....
Written: Apr 20 '01
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Pros: Fast, reliable hosting at an excellent price. Excellent multi-domain support.
Cons: No phone support.
The Bottom Line: The more you know about webmasterery, the more sense Dreamhost makes.
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| deaconb's Full Review: Dreamhost |
What are *you* looking for in web hosting?
Some hosting companies offer "unlimited bandwidth" which doesn't mean what one might think.
Think of it as an "all you can eat buffet". If the guy who stands in line in front of you takes all the shrimp, there isn't any for you - and when they set out more shrimp in ten minutes, you may end up behind another shrimp-lover.
There is a limited pipe going to the hosting company which you share with all the other users. An OC-48 is many times larger than a T-1 - but if you have to share that OC-48 with the population of Cincinnati, it's not nearly as useful as an unshared T-1.
So what do you get from Dreamhost? You get metered bandwidth. The cheapest plan gives you 2GB of transfer a month - but that's plenty for most users. One of my new sites gets 600-650 hits a day, yet only uses 0.2 GB a month of transfer. My oldest site gets a half-million hits a month and uses 4.5 GB.
Metered bandwidth means that it's in Dreamhost's interest to make sure that every user gets the page he wants - and Dreamhost has delivered for me. There are a variety of sites throughout the internet that test web sites for uptime and for responsiveness - and my sites always at or near the top of the charts for each.
Technical competence of the support staff is something else that should be important. When I started with Dreamhost two years ago, there was only Josh, and he was superior. These days, there are a variety of techies, and they aren't as good as Josh, but they are very good. I've done business with too many other hosting companies where the techs spout misinformation.
The amount of technical support may be important to you as well. Dreamhost's TOS says that you are expected to be a competent webmaster. If you use PERL scripts, for instance, you should know how to upload and install them. Some other web hosting companies will provide phone support to help with problems like this - and either they have to pay for it with higher fees or cut costs somewhere else. While Dreamhost techies *do* answer "stupid questions", they give you an answer by email within 24 hours. If you need more handholding than this, you need to go elsewhere.
The front office can be important. When I questioned a bill - I have a number of "add-ons" - Dreamhost responded within the standard 24 hours. They not only credited my bill for the error I found, but for another error I had missed, and credited me for that one, too. Nobody likes errors, but they happen. It's nice to be dealing with people who go out of their way to do right by their customer.
By comparison, I once moved a website away from Communitech.Net, despite having a month more hosting prepaid, because they couldn't seem to run their servers - and a month later, they charged my Visa account for yet more hosting. It took several months to get my money back from them.
Unlike many hosting companies, Dreamhost allows you to setup multiple domains on one account, each pointing to a different directory. One advantage of this is that domains can share resources such as data files. Another advantage is that you can manage all your domains with one ftp or telnet/ssh login.
The better hosting plans are also designed to appeal to multi-site webmasters.
Nobody wants to waste money on hosting, but the biggest waste of money is losing traffic because the site doesn't perform properly. I keep looking around, but I can't find anything that appeals more than Dreamhost's fast, reliable hosting.
Recommended:
Yes
Monthly fees (US$): About $50 (total) for my 8 domains
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: Yes
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content
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Epinions.com ID:
deaconb
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Reviews written: 3
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