You know how it is, time and time again you break up, then you get back together. 6 months later you break up again only to get back together once everything stabilizes. I can’t explain how but that’s my relationship with DreamHost over the last 2 years.
It happens without fail. Dreamhost crashes, I get upset then Dreamhost stabilizes for 2-3 months. I buy another site or recommend the service thinking “yeah it was bad last time but I’m sure they’ve figured things out” only to have the entire service crash again.
Take tonight for instance. I just finished setting up an expensive, complex Google Adwords campaign for a personal friend who’s site I hosted with Dreamhost. Just when I kicked it off, Dreamhost crashes.
Network Maintenance: Friday, January 28th – 22:00 through Saturday, January 29th 02:00 PST.
Really? Who does that? Who takes down thousands of customers with no advance notice other than a twitter post? Don’t they realize their customers have businesses to run and are counting on their service to be online?
Sorry… Had to get that out of my system… Please don’t knock on my door for a few hours, I’ll be moving my dreamhost sites over to Liquid tonight. How does it go?
Take down my sites once, shame on you. Take down my sites again and again and again… shame on me.
11 Comments
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
shockersh
January 29, 2011 at 11:46 am
Well… I personally think that unlike you groovydude, most people don’t make any cash on their blog (like me) so going down for a few hours isn’t that big of a deal. That being said yeah. I don’t like Dreamhost for that very reason. They are very unreliable and with so many other options out there, why stick around and deal with it.
MrGroove
January 29, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Sorry – don’t follow ya shocker. First you say it’s not a big deal then suggest people switch providers… So your bottom line is??
provamsi
January 29, 2011 at 6:10 pm
@shockersh, well, I just lot $10 from the outage. That’s couple of movie tickets in my place. 15 minutes outage went on for 5 hours and more. How could a web-company stretch the outage time that long?
MrGroove
January 29, 2011 at 6:30 pm
Oh – Thanks for the reminder. Need to file a ticket. I’m pretty sure their 100% Up-time guarantee says 1 free day of hosting will be credited to your account for each hour of downtime. Will let ya know what they say to that.
Debbi
April 5, 2012 at 3:30 am
Well, welcome to almost a year and a half later. You guys think 5 hours is bad?
How about 5 days?
WITH NO RESPONSE TO 5 SUPPORT TICKETS!
Well, they replied late last night, actually, with a bulk message and a credit for 2 months worth of hosting.
Dreamhost sucks. There will only be ONE time this happens to me, and if I’m lucky enough to get my site back without having to rebuild, it will be OFF Dreamhost’s server faster than a New York minute!
debbi
screenmates
November 26, 2011 at 1:46 am
Yes, it is shame on you! Your site does not even look like a site with so many ads starting off right in the header, in the content, footer and what not? Whipping up a wordpress blog takes what – 15 minutes? Getting on search engines takes what – 15 days? Posting shameless affiliate links for everything you are doing or not doing is shameless. Your site is slow because you are pulling content/data/ads/banners/etc from several other servers.
dfx
January 30, 2012 at 8:14 am
Accidents happen all the time, it doesn’t matter what host you use.
I’ve used all the major ones and Dreamhost is ideal for me and Im a big producer ..well not huge but I add at least 2 sites a month to my account..I have had tons of trouble with godaddy (which make you pay for every thing individually as “add ons”) and Network Solutions and many others…for custom builders and open source projects, dreamhost is tops.
We’re such a society now that we demand perfection in everything…and if you are truly paying ‘hundreds of dollars a month’ for a webhost and it’s not working then yes, you should move..if you want to keep it affordable..well that’s another matter entirely.
(But I bet most of us chose dreamhost for its affordability, flexibility and ease of use.)
Good luck!
Steve Krause
January 31, 2012 at 7:17 am
@DFX — what service do you have with Dreamhost? Do you use the basic shared services, the VPS or a dedicated servers? I’ve personally found the dedicated services to be much more stable than the other services. I’m curious what you’re building on it.
Dave Thomas
January 31, 2012 at 12:39 pm
I too have the same type of relationship with DH. I have two hosting accounts, one with DH and one with Bluehost. The BH account was created for back up to my DH. Bluehost has never had a problem, not once. DH has been crap lately, but I too think to myself…poop happens and now they have it together. Like a scorned lover I go back and poop happens yet again. Still haven’t moved all of my sites. Some group has it out for these guys with the latest DDoS attack. I don’t feel safe there. I may bite the bullet this weekend and move the rest of my sites and end this painful relationship.
Michael
April 14, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Okay. It’s now 2012, mid-April to be exact and there are still problems accessing dreamhost.
So.
What’s the alternative. Can someone recommend a good, reliable hosting service, please.
Cheers,
Michael.
Steve Smith
November 2, 2015 at 4:41 pm
We run websites on a number of services and I would have to say Dreamhost is probably one of the worst hosting experience we have ever had. I would recommend not even buying domains through them, because they are so unreliable the redirects become a problem when they are down. We had one site down for 3 days!