406 Not Acceptable

With some regret I have left my old host Dreamhost. So I guess I better do a mini-review, which explains why I have left them.

I started using Dreamhost in the middle of 2007 and started by Postnuke powered, but now dead, site Tech-Rant. This was back before they launched the single price plan system that they currently use. They had a mixed reputation; however, their hosting experience, user forum, and rather cheery blog brought me round to using them. In my opinion, a host without a forum for their customers is a host to avoid; although, I am sure there are some good ones out there!

I had no problems setting up Postnuke and the webpanel provided by Dreamhost was rather handy with simple administration tasks. I tried using their automatic install and updating Wordpress and Mediawiki installs on other domains. The automatic install feature is good, but restricts users with plugins, so I never stuck to it. I did experience moderate downtime, but overall my sites have been up for around 98 to 99 percent of the time.

For a while I have had one Postnuke site, two Wordpress blogs, and a Mediawiki wiki hosted on the plan across various domains. The sites load fast enough for me and Dreamhost have never complained about about the server load under reasonable use. The one time they did was due to a bug on a Postnuke comment system, which led to the games on Tech-Rant being spammed over nine thousand times each. Hence you can imagine the SQL query for each load of those pages! Still they were reasonable about it and gave me ample time to fix the problem.

I did consider moving to Dreamhost’s Private Server plan; however, I find it rather expensive for what you get. For a new user it costs $25 a month for a private non-database server, with the databases being placed on a shared server. This server only has 150 mhz and 150 MB of memory and based off these specifications I would estimate that the pipe will be shared across somewhere between 50 and 100 users (so 20Mbit to 10Mbit each.) Now a simple Ubuntu Server LAMP install with Apache2, PHP, and MySQL will use around half of this when idle. Add a blog, forum, or your favourite content management system and you can see that the server will be nearing its limitations. Whilst Dreamhost have offered long time customers a discount ($10 off for life in my case,) this still is expensive for a private server; although, it is a semi-managed solution. I did kindly send support a ticket stating that I would be leaving and from their response the cost seems to be an issue for a number of users.

In comparison my nice new host Linode offers me 360MB of memory and the system will only be shared over 40 users (so 25Mbit bandwidth.) Now this is only costing $20 a month, for a superior service; on a host with a better reputation than Dreamhost. So it is easy to see why the Private Server option is rather poor! I already have the LAMP set up and the server is running a Trackmania Server, which has been much better than running it off my broadband (against Sky’s terms!)

I will be sticking with Dreamhost for domain registration as, against my original thoughts, they aren’t that many cheaper registrars… shame really!

I can still honestly recommend Dreamhost to anyone looking for a decent and cheap webhost; just not their private servers!