Toria's Daily Ramblings » dreamhost

Dreamhost suck – Episode # 234534

Toria — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:37:17 +0000

So, I just found out that if I cancel my Dreamhost package now — while I am all paid up until June 2009, I won’t see a single cent of that money back.

Unbelievable.

I really thought my opinion of them couldn’t sink any lower than it already was after the way they handled (or in fact, failed to handle at all) my Reality TV site getting a peak in traffic.

How can they possible justify charging me for 6+ months of service that they won’t be supplying me with? What are they charging me for exactly? What is the point in pre paying rather than going month by month if you risk losing up to $120 if you need to cancel before the year is up? Is it even legal to charge for nothing?!

I don’t mind admitting when I am wrong, and in this case I was wrong. My opinion of Dreamhost could sink lower, and it has. They’ve stolen approx $60 from me as far as I am concerned.

Moving hosts

Toria — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:01:09 +0000

I am in the process of moving all of my sites from my current host, to my new host.

I think I have finally mastered the art of moving wordpress blogs with zero downtime and no work to do other than a bit of FTPing, but I am not looking to moving the site my other halves family uses for email, or the PHP script site I have been running since 2001 and is a hot mess.

I’ve certainly done the easy ones first.

5 down, 9 to go.

Reality TV site back online!

Toria — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:52:04 +0000

Dreamhost finally contacted me, after leaving me hanging for 20 hours. I am not even sure if the issue is resolved or not, but my site is back online right now. They said it was never really ‘down’, I just couldn’t access it because they limited the connections, but I know from my logs that no one was able to access my site for several hours.

I don’t know if it’s going to go down again every time I get some decent traffic, but they let me know a few things I could do to reduce server load, so I guess only time will tell. Fingers crossed. Host issues are the last thing I need right now.

Dreamhost is seriously not cool right now

Toria — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 03:39:30 +0000

I am really annoyed with my webhost now, it’s several hours since they pulled my site offline and mailed me to let me know of the issue — but they are yet to respond to my email about it. It’s seriously uncool to just pull my site like that without warning and then leave me hanging for several hours, I am headed to be within the next hour so if they have not responded by then I will be very very unhappy with them come morning

It wasn’t that long ago I was writing about a website that helps you to find the perfect host, I noted that I didn’t need to use it myself as my web host is great and I am very happy with them, but that you guys might find it useful.

Looks like I might be needing it after all.

Not so dreamyhost right now

Toria — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:25:26 +0000

Ugh, my web host just emailed me to tell me that there’s a problem with my reality tv site and they have pulled it offline completely without warning.

Here’s the email they sent me:

We are contacting you to inform you that we have had to throttle the connections to your site (realitytvfan.org) as it was causing the apache server you are on to run out of available connection slots. While we attempt to avoid disruption of customer services in this case it was causing problems for other users so we were forced to take action. If you can redesign your site to be less process-intensive (we only throttle sites when they are causing load in the server in addition to having many connections – if you just have static content for example that’s easy for the machine to serve up and we can just give you more connections) we’ll be happy to review the case for you. It is also possible that you have outgrown shared hosting and are ready for your own private server:

http://dreamhostps.com

If you are interested in that option please contact support with any questions you have any we’ll be happy to assist you.

I don’t even fully understand what they are telling me, or what they expect me to do especially as I can’t actually access my site to make any changes. I just checked my usage and I am using zero, yes ZERO percent of my bandwidth allowance. I find it hard to believe that a simple high traffic blog can be causing them much of a problem — and notice the plug they got in for their newly launched private server service? Hmm.

Hopefully they will help me work out a solution to this, and fast, otherwise it’ll be adios to Dreamhost from me and hello to a decent host who can handle a blog getting a few 1000 hits a day!