So it's time for me to switch hosting. I've been doing a lot of research into alternate providers, and it seems like Dreamhost and 1and1 are the only two that are really in the ballpark.

I was all ready to jump the gun and sign up with Dreamhost, but the recent rash of outages and problems has me concerned about their operations at a higher level.

1and1 has much better rates, great uptime and features. But they also have a history of overbilling by huge amounts and part of their terms of service states you allow them to charge you for ANYTHING they see fit. I've now seen dozens of testimonials of people who've had to take them to court and deal with throngs of creditors.

Am I being really over-cautious here? Are there any other hosts with similar pricing/feature sets that are reliable? I would go with tqhosting, but their plans are simply out of my budget.

9/6/2006 12:51:47 PM

i now have about 8 sites with 1and1 for up to a year and have yet to have a problem. They are all low-traffic sites, so i haven't gone over any quotas or anything, but i have experienced zero noticeable downtime (i.e. there may have been downtime, but i haven't seen it).
The control panel works fine, and i'm pleased with the speed.

9/6/2006 1:15:08 PM

dreamhost has def had a lot of problems lately. i switched to them about 2 months ago and even with the problems lately, I don't regret it. what kind of site are you hosting? just a casual site or do you have specific uptime/resource requirements? and what's your budget? i did one of those $97 referrals and paid like $20 for a year's service.

[Edited on September 6, 2006 at 1:32 PM. Reason : budget]

9/6/2006 1:30:34 PM

i, too, am curious...i have a reseller account with ivhosting.com ($100/year) and i like the cpanel management...anyone have a reseller account with dreamhost?

9/6/2006 1:33:09 PM

I have dreamhost and 1and1...

Everything is simple and fast with dreamhost, and they have some pretty good installs that integrate nicely..

1and1 is my 3 year old free account that I just use to manage domain names.
I cant really speak to its reliability, but I have never had problems with the simple sites I have hosted on there. They are a bigger company, so You can expect their service and fixes to get responded to more quickly.

I have a code for dreamhost if you need the first year discount.

9/6/2006 1:38:45 PM

I've had Dreamhost for over a year now, and although I don't really have a huge site (mainly just for temporary file hosting and playing around with stuff), I have only noticed that my site has been down one time in the past year. I can't remember what the problem was, but it only lasted for a short while. I'm certain there have been other downtimes, but they happened when I wasn't trying to access my site.

I really like Dreamhost for their huge disk and bandwidth quotas. 1TB+ per month per customer is a lot, but in reality probably less than 0.1% of their customers actually suck up that kind of bandwidth, so it makes a good selling point. The 20GB+ of storage makes it easy for me to upload anything I want, and not have to worry about using up too much storage. It works great for backing up my large research data files. They have an awesome backup system, too. I accidentally deleted something that I didn't mean to, and was immediately able to 'cd' into a special folder and access many older versions of the data I deleted.

I used to host with hassell, so I had some experience with the CPanel management software. It was nice, but I really like Dreamhost's site management site. It's fast, easy, and works really well. I don't know if I would consider it a major decision factor between choosing Dreamhost or 1and1.

Dreamhost also gives you tons of email addresses, aliases, forwards, etc. As I mentioned before, I use DH to backup a lot of my data (I routinely rsync my documents and research folders to them). I also use DH to backup my email, while still have it on an "active" IMAP account. I never figured out a solid way to store my old emails on CD or whatever, and be able to access them easily. With DH, I just created a 'backup' user, and duplicate all my emails I receive on my other accounts. I've had some issues with the email system being a little slow, but it could have easily been my Internet acting up. They've also had a few issues with their email authentication database, making it difficult to login sometimes, but that's usually no big deal.

I also like the fact that they give you full ssh access into your account, and even give you the capability to create multiple users for various uses. Their technical support could be a little better, but I usually receive a response within 24 hours or so, which is what they advertise. They're even willing to install various addons and modules to certain programs for you. I was toying around with some Wiki software and trying to implement a LaTeX equation processor into it. Their servers were lacking a LaTeX UTF8 converter, and they were more than happy to install it for me.

All in all, I have been very pleased, and actually recently renewed for another year of service. I feel that the data I put on there is safe and easily accessible, which is all I was looking for.

9/6/2006 2:28:12 PM

^^ I could probably use the discount code if you don't mind PM'ing it to me.

9/6/2006 2:37:42 PM

I have dreamhost for my personal stuff, as well as a few low traffic business domains. They, somehow, have been more reliable than verio's hosting for our main site in the past month or so.

9/6/2006 2:47:49 PM

I am moving from a shared dedicated server, I run about a dozen critical websites. None of them are terribly high traffic at any one time, but during the occasional press-release, product announcement etc, the traffic can skyrocket almost instantly.

I've had to shut down some of my sites on a few occasions because they blew past the 1TB limit of the server in a matter of a few hours. With 1and1 there is no way to do this automatically, they will only send you a daily notification of overages and CHARGE you for it.

9/6/2006 3:12:24 PM

^ You can cap the amount of bandwith allocated to each site on DreamHost. I've never had to do it before, but I've seen the options in the panel.

9/6/2006 3:18:43 PM

Nice, that is pretty much mandatory. I'm wondering why there isn't this feature on 1and1, other than to bilk people out of money.

Basically:

Dreamhost - Not reliable recently

1and1 - No bandwidth cap ability

[Edited on September 6, 2006 at 3:24 PM. Reason : .]

9/6/2006 3:23:55 PM

My code is ROBSTER05

I get nothing out of it, and you get a 97 dollar discount I believe

9/6/2006 6:18:04 PM

I've been using iPowerWeb.com for a long time...i have multiple accounts with them and i've never had problems.

9/6/2006 7:18:41 PM

^^yea ive already found several codes for dreamhost. thanks for the heads up though

^ill check them out thanks

9/6/2006 8:35:57 PM

get real hosting, its cheap i promise

http://www.softlayer.com

9/7/2006 12:16:17 AM

I currently have "real" hosting. The retarded datacenter's policies are the reason I'm leaving. It's been an awesome experience otherwise.

9/7/2006 12:19:50 AM

I don't know when this happened, but I logged into my DreamHost account and noticed I have 202.3GB of storage, and when I checked a few weeks ago, I had about 23GB of storage.

I went to their website and saw this:



Not only did I see an ugly fat guy, but it looks like they 10x their storage and doubled the monthly bandwidth. that's just nuts

10/6/2006 12:52:02 PM

yeah, they mentioned that in their september newsletter

Quote :

"1. It's our birthday? Double the bandwidth, tenify the disk! So, what feature WAS I alluding to last month anyway? Could it that it's now been NINE years since we registered dreamhost.com, and to celebrate we've upped everybody's disk and bandwidth, AGAIN, wellll beyond the realm of possible use: up to TEN times the disk (including growth rate) and at LEAST double the bandwidth (also including weekly growth rate)! And as usual, all existing customers get it too, and you don't even have to do anything to upgrade. It's ... already ... happened. Anyway, that puts us at, um. Er. I'm not sure. A lot. Check it out: http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html But WAIT! Is that a new site design for dreamhost.com I see? And what's that on the main page? Pictures of employees and RSS feeds? GRADIENTS? Amazing! What version of the web would you even CONSIDER a site like this? It's gotta be more than 1.5, possibly even 1.9.. This is some kind of killer upgrade, for sure. Possibly even SUPER. And for those of you who say, "SCREW all the features, ALL I *really* want is website, email, and database stability!" I say, "You are smart." "

[Edited on October 6, 2006 at 12:59 PM. Reason : i like the web2.0 reference]

10/6/2006 12:59:11 PM

I'm lovin' dreamhost

...Great storage space and bandwidth to begin with, but now they've gone over the edge. Someone has lost their mind But, I ain't complainin' ...

10/6/2006 1:20:33 PM

dreamhost has been very good for me for quite a while. Verio on the other hand has been complete shit for the past 2-3 months. databases mysteriously dissappearing, unable to access the database (1040 error), slow site response, etc. I probably have had to call them 10 times this summer to get them to resolve this crap. I'm planning on shopping around for a new host for the one domain that is still on verio.

10/6/2006 2:32:52 PM

Anyone ever used or know anything about http://www.site5.com/ ? They were recommended to me by a friend in the webdev arena but no one else I've talked to has ever used them

10/6/2006 3:15:53 PM

I'm still with progress

10/6/2006 3:48:20 PM

Yeah, Dreamhost rocks. I've had hosting with them since summer and I'm really enjoying it

10/7/2006 8:07:17 AM