March 29, 2007

Having a Bad Dream(host)

March 29, 2007, 9:02 PM | 12 Comments

For the past 16 months I’ve been using Dreamhost to host this site. For the most part, I’ve been pleased with their service and support, but lately things just haven’t been the same.

I originally switched over to Dreamhost at the recommendation – either personally or through what they’d written about Dreamhost on their sites – of quite a few “high-profile” designers (Mike Davidson, Jason Santa Maria, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, etc.). At the time I sent a few emails back and forth with Jason just about his personal thoughts towards Dreamhost, their reliability, support, bang for buck and a few other things. All in all I came away with a fairly solid opinion and recommendation of Dreamhost, and eventually I made the switch.

Things were great for the first few months. I didn’t really have to worry about anything, and any request I had was usually looked after in no more than 15 minutes. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. Over the past 9-10 months, Dreamhost has been experiencing a lot of problems. What was once one of the most well respected hosts in the budget hosting sector has experienced so many problems over the past 9 months that it has quite a few people scratching their heads, not the least of which was Mike Davidson.

If you’ve been a regular reader of Mike’s site for a while now, you’ll know that he’s always been an avid supporter of Dreamhost and their services, but even he was prepared to walk away from Dreamhost back in August at a personal cost to him of about $30,000 a year in referral bonuses. While those issues that caused the big meltdown that Mike referred to back in August have been sorted out, Dreamhost’s level of service has continued to diminish. By their own admission, their increase in popularity over the past couple of years has directly lead to their service levels deteriorating.

Is it time to wake up?

So for the past 3 or 4 months I’ve been thinking about waking up from my Dream(host) and moving to another provider, even if it means losing some money on the contract fees I’ve already payed (my current term doesn’t run out until November). Up until now though, most of this has just been me questioning whether or not I feel like it’s worth it to stick it out. Last night may have been the last straw though when Dreamhost had a major problem that effectively took down half of their servers.

As Mike mentioned in his post, this isn’t the end of the world and there are no people dying and as far as I know, I’m not losing any money because my precious website is unreachable. What it comes down to though is the fact that I pay for a service, and I’m becoming more and more dissatisfied with that service. Please don’t get me wrong, even though the downtime last night may be the “last straw” I’m certainly not going to react right away because of this outage nor am I going to sight this latest problem as my reason to leave. I’ve just noticed a lot of slowdowns lately and more frequent outages, so this is really the result of a culmination of all of those things and apparently, I’m not alone in my frustration.

Like I said above, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I honestly don’t want to leave Dreamhost because for the most part I’m a big fan of what they’re doing. They’ve always been open, honest and up-front about everything and their support is still very good. I don’t know if I’ll leave yet, but I’m starting to think about it more and more lately, and that’s not a good sign.

So what’s my point?

Well, I’d really like to get some other opinions on this matter. Am I being too sensitive? If other Dreamhosters read this site, what have your recent experiences been like? If you’re on another host, would you recommend them? Who do you recommend for hosting? These are all things that I’d like to consider before making any type of switch. If on the off chance that someone high up at Dreamhost reads this, please post your comments on the matter because I’d love to hear from more than just the friendly support staff.

For the past few months I’ve been considering switching to (mt) Media Temple because I’ve been hearing a lot of great things about them. Secretly, I was hoping that Media Temple (one of the main sponsors) would include some coupons for discounted hosting plans in the bag of freebies we got at Web Directions North. Their Grid Server technology is really intriguing and in theory will end a lot of the problems you frequently have to endure with shared hosting. Anyways, back when I worked for Outside Studios we used Media Temple for a couple of client sites and I was pretty impressed by what I saw, but didn’t want to pay the price for their service when I started this site. Media Temple has always been more expensive than their main competitors, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing? Perhaps it’s a “grass is always greener” situation, but I’ve never heard much complaining from (mt) customers and I’ve never noticed downtime or bad slowdowns on their sites.

So the floor’s open, please post your comments and/or suggestions and help me figure out what my best course of action is. Current (mt) customers: your testimonials would be greatly appreciated as well because if I had to make the switch today, my preferred choice would be Media Temple right now.

Posted in: Reinspire