For the last 2 years I’ve now been a Dreamhost-customer. I initially moved there simply because of the price. It’s really hard to beat 9USD per month for tons of disk space and bandwidth, not to mention FastCGI support in addition to the usual LAMP-stuff. But then the first problems started when I noticed that it was kind of a rocky road to a mid-size configuration marathon to get for instance Django running there probably due to a really weird server config.
[Picture based on Sailing by Bob Jagendorf (cc)]
Then after a series of smaller outages (that never really affected me that much) February 2007 came with a really big one which ended up pissing off probably most of their customers including me. Then for the rest of the year the server was rather reliable, naturally still with the typical FastCGI-quirks that I really couldn’t reproduce until the end. And actually these were the problems that drove me to look for a different host where I can reliably deploy whatever I want, be it Django, Pylons [insert WSGI app here], Rails, Drupal, … whatever. Back then I was still thinking about still keeping my account there since it was cheap and there was nothing to say against a backup server ;-)
But then January 15th 2008 came with Dreamhost accidentally billing (what it seems like) all their customers for the next 2 years. That was the moment when I decided to move everything off my Dreamhost account. It took me more or less an extra month to first of all get my own sites off but also a friend of mine who shares the account with me to move his sites off.
So thank you Dreamhost for a mostly good experience but also with the tiny problems that sum up to annoyances. Not to mention the big problems like the whole billing issue which simply was too much.
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