DreamHost 2 Year Review
Version 1.006 (Updated July 2009)

From Hosting Zoom to DreamHost - A host which makes big promises, really BIG promises. 500GB storage (that grows every week), 5TB (that's 5,000 GB) of bandwidth every month and five free domain registrations thrown in! Plus PHP4, PHP5, Ruby On Rails,SSH, unlimited domains and much more. And as of July 2009, unlimited space and bandwidth!

Sounds big, so without further ado, here are the pros and cons of the service so far as of July 2009

The Good Things (Pros)

1. BIG space and bandwidth and hosting of unlimited domains
2. Direct DNS control of your domains! Setup subdomains to point to another server and all those technical DNS stuff all from your control panel! No need to e-mail Support!
3. SSH access. Install whatever version of PHP you want (as CGI).
4. Big community of users in the web - if you have a problem setting up a script, chances are you will find someone else having the same problem too due to the large number of Dreamhost customers.
5. Allows you to keep raw logs for as long as you want! UPDATE: Now Dreamhost limits raw logs to 30 days! This is very disappointing!
   
   
   Max 30 days only for raw logs.
   
6. INSTANT access to their backups. You can access a backup of your entire account for 1 hour ago, 1 day ago, 1 week ago and 2 weeks ago. For MySQL, you can access their backups for the past 5 days in 24hr intervals.! This is a super cool feature!
   
   Note that you can access only those 4 save points at any one time. You cannot, for example, look for a backup that is 1.5 weeks old. Also, it does not work if your site has FrontPage enabled. More info here.
7. Direct access to MySQL server from your home PC. No need for phpMyAdmin!
8. Supports Subversion - a Concurrent Versions System (CVS) for depositing source Code. Great for team projects especially since Netbeans Java supports Subversion as well.
9. Combining 7 and 8 above, you can use DreamHost as a central server for source files and database with your peers
10. 50GB of personal backup space is provided as well. Check under "Backups User" in control panel. Talk about a great free extra!
    

The Bad Things (Cons)

1. Does not use the standard control panel. But I found it easy to use, although lack of some features such as Last 50 Visitors and the File Manager. Deleting a folder with many files can be slow over FTP, but this can be worked around with SSH access.
2. Catch-all e-mail address can only be set to a GMail address NEW - catch-all e-mail addresses cannot be set to any external e-mail account, even GMail! You cannot forward dreamhost catch-alls to even GMail accounts, only Dreamhost hosted e-mail accounts. Another disappointing change.
3. Cpanel uses HTTPS for "security reasons". Yes, it is secure, but much slower as well. But it prevents those wi-fi snoopers from capturing your session.
4. Creating a subdomain takes a few hours to be activated. With cPanel, it is instant.
   
5. PHP 5 runs in CGI mode. Although the wiki entry says that there are only very few *minor* disadvantages, I found them very major. Here are the major issues I came across:
   
   
   1. It can be 400 to 700 percent slower depending on the server load. Quote from the wiki entry: It's just as fast as running PHP as an Apache module, Raaaight.
      
   2. CGI causes problems with some PHP scripts.
   Luckily, DreamHost allows you to set PHP as a module if you want for domains prior to August 28 2008. The drawbacks are some restrictions and that you can only run PHP 4 this way.
   
   For newer domains, you are out of luck and are forced to use 500% slower PHP 5 CGI. There is a suggestion to run PHP 5 as a module since Nov 2005. To this day, it has not been implemented. Dreamhost Customers, please click here to vote for it.
6. No live chats or telephone support unless you opt for the higher plans
7. No Shared SSL unless you are willing to fork out for a static IP address and a SSL certificate.
8. Raw logs can only be kept for a maximum of 30 days

Problems with Hosting Zoom

You may be wondering why I left Hosting Zoom, known to be a reliable host from WebHostingTalk.com. I was under their 4.95 per month Zoom plan, when they had a 'all doubled' promotion going on. Since then, I have had these persistent problems which I grew tired of.

The words in italics are their support responses as best as I can recall. I believe Hosting Zoom out sources their support to India as I have been mostly seeing Indian names in live chats.

1. FTP access breaks at times
   Response: Your FTP works now. Let us know if we can help you with any other matters.
2. Support Ticket site does not maintain login information accurately hence I can never stay logged in for more than 2 pages.
   Response: It looks like a problem on your side. Sorry we can't do anything here
3. Messing up the site's raw logs every once in a while resulting in a loss of some days of logs. This causes me to download the raw logs at least once every week due to a 'fear' that the raw logs may get corrupt.
   Response: We'll ensure it never happen again
4. Raw logs are not included in their daily backups.
5. Removing a custom DNS entry without any warning. This goes on until I realize it. Once or twice is fine. But it happens every once in a while.

None of the above issues exist with DreamHost so far. But I won't say that Hosting Zoom sucks - as the issues I had are not the major requirements of most hosting customers who are just looking for hosting.

November 2008: 'Unlimited' Bandwidth Promises

During the month of November 2008, there was a major event in which Bootstrike.Com provided some useful legal downloads.

For that month alone, the bandwidth usage was 960GB, something that Bootstrike.Com rarely gets.

DreamHost throttled down the site by reducing the number of connections when it noticed that it was taking up too much bandwidth:

We are contacting you to inform you that we have had to throttle the connections to your site (bootstrike.com) 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...

A important thing of note is that all pages of the site were still loading very well - less than 0.01 seconds for most pages - so there were no process heavy tasks or apparent slowdown of the server. Due to the throttle of the site, many visitors were getting these messages

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Visitors to the site were getting broken images and downloads that could not start for 5 hours while I tried to get a response from the technical desk. I sent them a mail at 1300 GMT +8 and got a reply only at 1822 GMT+8 - 6 hours after I sent the mail with which the throttle was removed.

A tech officer later clarified that I was using too much bandwidth, at once. I found the explanation reasonable as the site was taking about 50Mbps at once and that is considered very good for shared hosting. It was fine later on, as the site managed to cope well.

End verdict? Thumbs up for DreamHost. They did not shut down my site when it was consuming too much bandwidth. That is a very good move. Although they took quite long to reply to my mail, they did eventually lift the throttle and Bootstrike.Com was back in business.

December 2008 Update: So Far So Good

I have been with DreamHost for about 12 months now. I can say that so far, DreamHost has been very good. I never missed the live technical support that Hosting Zoom provided as I did not have any major problems.

Initially, I had problems with Google showing URLs with PHPSESSID. This was fixed by adding the following code in the .htaccess file (thanks to m_freeman2004 from Drupal Forums)

# Fix for ?PHPSESSID in clean URLs
php_value session.use_trans_sid 0
php_value session.use_only_cookies 1
# End of fix

The other problem I faced was that PHP's performance was very slow. This has been highlighted above, and was resolved by downgrading to PHP 4 Apache module, just by adding the following in .htaccess. Dreamhost Customers, please vote for the suggestion to implement PHP 5 as a Apache module.

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

Of course, this means foregoing PHP 5 support which I hope Dreamhost will support as a PHP 5 Module.

Finally, there were the occasional down times. It is a small price to pay for the huge list of features.

Nothing is perfect. There are always some negative aspects. I find them a small issue, but they may be big issues for you, depending on your needs.

July 2009 Update: Best Shared Hosting So Far

Two years and it has been (and going) a smooth sailing but slightly edgy experience.

For one, despite the suggestion to "Add support for running PHP5 as an Apache module", nothing has been done so far about it.

Another, DreamHost wants to interfere in my site's private files by adding 3 files in my domain directory. Says the 404 errors are consuming unnecessary resources. True, but adding files without asking is something that could cause problems.

Finally, I have to make it a point to backup my raw log files every month. Not something hard to do, but still a commitment that I have to do every month.

With all the above, I enjoyed 2 years trouble free as compared to my previous web host, Hosting Zoom.

Questions, Errors and Queries?

Please post any queries you have in the Comments below.

This document is Copyright(©) 2006-2009 by G.Ganesh. Visit Bootstrike.Com (http://www.bootstrike.com).

Last Updated 19th July 2009.

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