An Honest Dreamhost Review
Update: How novel, I’m only chatting a little shit! You should read this. You can read my post if you like, but those two are a lot better.
I have been with Dreamhost nearly a year now and I feel that this is a reasonable amount of time to review them. A lot of people are suspicious about Dreamhost, and they have every right to be. Why? Referrals.
It cost me about $20 to sign up for the “Crazy Domain Insane!” plan, as opposed to the $119 it should have cost me. This is because I used a “referral coupon”. If someone ever gives you a Dreamhost referral coupon that takes off less than $97 then they are profiting from that coupon. You see, once you’re a member of Dreamhost you can create your own coupons redeeming up to $97. If you make a $50 coupon then you get ($97-50)=$47. So never, ever believe what anyone with a < $97 coupon says, they just want you to give you their money. This coupon business is what makes me very suspicious about Dreamhost, the vast majority of their sign ups result in them getting only $23.
Twenty three dollars does NOT pay for 20 GB of disk space and 12 TB of Bandwidth (1 TB per Month).
Or does it? The truth is that Dreamhost are so huge that everything comes to them at crazy wholesale rates. They’ve never publicly said how much it costs, but many times they’ve commented on how it costs them cents for every plan and despite the referrals they make profit.
Somehow it still seems too good to be true, right? Yes, that’s because one important factor is missing, this is processing. One Dreamhost server can host thousands of websites. On one server alone I see 1,139 user accounts, users may host as many websites as they like on their account so this could equate to tens or hundreds of thousands of websites. And handling them all is Dreamhost’s main problem. This is where they are known to get a bit tricky. They don’t tell you what their limits are, don’t tell you when you’re near your limit and are generally vague about the whole thing. Of course, if you do go over it they will kill your site and send you a nice e-mail suggesting you stop eating up their CPU and buy a dedicated server from them. Rumour has it that they do not impose a processing limit on sites that aren’t at the end of their 97 day “money back” period.
In all honesty, this is a problem for many hosts. Back in the day they served up HTML files and now they have to support PHP, MySQL, Ruby on the Rails, etc. etc. all of which can use up serious processing power. Controlling and limiting this is difficult.
Processing problems appear to be the main cause for a lot of anti-Dreamhost sentiment I’ve seen lately but people also take issue with the support. Frankly, up until recently I would have to agree with them. One support ticket took a week to get a response others misunderstood me completely and did not help. However, lately the support has really gotten its act together, it took 4 hours to get a reply from an enquiry about a broken MySQL server (which they politely pointed out was my fault).
So to conclude:
- Don’t believe anyone with a Dreamhost coupon for less than $97. They are lying about Dreamhost.
- Wholesale prices mean Dreamhost’s deals might be legitimate, but there is probably a little overselling.
- Processing is where the catch is, if you have a PHP site likely to generate 1TB of traffic a month .. get a dedicated server.
- Support and stability are getting better
- Every host has these problems
If you came here in search of a coupon then I have made one for you: FF9797OFF
This coupon gets you everything off that it can, to proof this I have attched a screenshot :