Opinions on dreamhost
Dreamhost is a big hosting company, celebrating 10 years of existence.
Searching for a suitable host for an old site i administer and being interested in developing
something in Ruby on Rails for
myself, i stumbled upon their offer. I picked them out of a bunch of other offers,
mesmerized by the huge bandwidth, disk space and supported features.
I've been using them as my webhost for a year now (as of 10.2007), so I'll
mark this anniversary (coincidentally theirs as well) by sharing a few opinions on their service.
Features and Pricing
After going through their impressive feature list I was not only satisfied, but thought I could get all my friends hosted as well, with just one account. [1]
Feature Overview
Aside from all the standard hosting features (php, [f]cgi, mysql, ftp, ssh, email, mailing lists, subdomains, multiple domains etc), they throw in a bunch of goodies that get a geek to nod appreciatively: svn, cvs, webdav, jabber, crontab, htaccess. And it all comes in 'ultra' size: hundreds of GB of space, terrabytes of bandwidth and all of the features named above are virtually unlimited. Dangerously generous i'd say... it gets your eyes glittering with greed.
Their fidelity offers are a pleasant surprise, granting you monthly increases in bandwith and disk space.
There's also a neat rewards system, offering referral bonuses that you can win in various ways,
going up to 2nd tier gratifications (referral of the referral). I signed up with a promotional
code too, (generated by a friend - older dreamhost user) that reduced my first year subscription to a mere
20$. When creating the promotional code you can specify
what amount of the 97$ bonus you want to keep for yourself (the referrer) and how much you pass to your
referred friend (in the form of discounts or extra features).
Hence the insane amount of sites dealing with promo codes, referral deals and so-called reviews
, all part of the Dreamhost mafia :). [2]
Unsupported applications can be installed in the home directory, some of them are documented in the wiki. I've been playing with the git version control system for a while and I found all the necessary information to get me going. Exotic stuff isn't for the faint hearted, but if you really want, you can hack your way through, with the community backing you up.
Control Panel
They've recently spruced up their CP giving it a nice 'web2.0' touch. Javascript foldable menus, less page refreshing and navigating, a more 'desktop-like' feeling.
I've used a couple of control panels before and they all had an unorganized, cluttered, ugly feeling about
them. Styling was probably not considered a priority and proper UI design a thing that
'power-users' don't need. Well... that's not the case and Dreamhost knows it - this is probably the best
I've seen so far: clean and pleasant while still having lots of features. And it can, of course, manage
everything in the features list:
domains, users, databases, mailing lists (with junkfilter!), htaccess, subversion repositories etc.
An important thing to notice is the "one-click installs" section. Having your own blog or image gallery
is literally 3 clicks away. Updates are provided for the supported applications, so you just have to click a button
and voila!, you have the latest Wordpress installed. They support about a dozen of these, a representative one for
each "class" of popular web apps: Wordpress for blogs, Gallery for images, the Joomla! CMS, the phpbb forum, MediaWiki, etc.
Ruby on Rails
Rails is officially supported and run with fcgi. A vast amount of ruby gems are available and if you need something out of the ordinary in your application you can install it in the vendor directory. Mongrel is not available yet, but it might come soon, if users stress its importance loud enough.
Given that i haven't had real traffic I can't say much about how fcgi performs under stress. Nevertheless, there are
other issues to be discussed. For one, the fcgi processes' start times leave something to be desired. I've
frequently noticed delays of up to 10 seconds for the first request and have seen some reports of
up to 24 seconds ?!!.
Secondly, the 'dreamhost watchdog' sometimes 'barks' too aggressively (also mentioned in the above link).
The watchdog is an observer that handles process load on the shared servers. In other words, if one of your processes
steps out of line in terms of resource usage, it gets killed. This causes headaches, as I've experienced
myself. Fortunately there are ways around it - like
this rails plugin that allows your requests to finish before giving in to the watchdog's kill request.
[3]
Speed and Reliability
As stated before, there was no real traffic on the sites on my account. Even so, I'm a bit dissatisfied with the general
responsiveness. Aside from the fcgi considerations discussed above, an important issue for the administrator/developer is
the 'snappiness' of all interfaces to the hoster. One such interface is SSH and I'm not sure why, but there always was a distinctive,
very annoying lag when working in the remote console.
I've been hosting the site itself and other projects on the dreamhost svn. Curiously the apparent svn bandwidth is hopelessly
small, making committal and deployment a nuisance.
One could argue that it's a shared host and these are small issues, but smoothness and responsiveness are all the more
important for the UI 'feel'.
Customer Support and Community
Community voice can be easily expressed by using 'voting points'. A bunch of them are assigned to each user and they can be used to propose or vote on features that you think should be included in the future. They also have a wiki that is pretty organized and complete.
Customer support is reportedly good. I had only one issue which prompted their assistance - payment. Card payments are verified in an unusual manner: you have to send a faxed page that you fill in and sign. This has to include an impression of the embossed name and card number, obtained by rubbing a pencil or crayon on the surface of the paper. How's that for 21st century technology? Nevertheless, i would've done it if my card were embossed. But in the card details form there was nothing indicating this little detail, so i was stuck and pissed off. In the end the support people were patient and collaborative, I filled in the payment details page again using a friend's embossed card, sent the fax, payed the money and that's that.
As far as user interaction is concerned, they have all the regular channels (tickets, forum, wiki) and then some. Josh Jones writes a blog and a newsletter in a flamboyant and energetic style that gives color and personality to the dreamhost corporate logo. Probably the best newsletter i've ever been subscribed to.
En Fin
Summing it up, they have all the features you could possibly want from a shared host and a large user base that provides
useful information in the wiki and forums. On top of that they care about their users, keeping in touch with us by
writing about achievements as well as problems (and they do it in style too). There are of course things that don't work
as good and fast as we'd want them to and there's always room for improvement, but I'm optimistic about it.
All in all it gets my geeky nod.
If I have, in the course of this article, inspired any amount of objectivity and seriousness, I'll trash it all now,
by joining the aforementioned ranks of referral maniacs. So... if you want 50$ waived off your first bill use the
promo code "sebi". There you have it... dreamhost does bring out the greedy bastard in you.
Cheers!