April 24, 2003

I have a process on my web host that runs every hour and uses the database, so I get email whenever the database is unavailable. Every four or five months, DreamHost has an unannounced database outage, often for many hours. By count of the emails I received, the outage earlier this week lasted over 11 hours. Every time this happens, I fret for days about changing web hosts, only to be stalled by the cost of doing so, and then my interest fades until the next outage.

I have a hard time knocking DreamHost, because they're otherwise pretty stellar and deserving of their loyal following. Their prices are good, their automated features are many and powerful, and their customer service blows me away. I've sent several people to DreamHost based on these qualities, including a policy I renew every year for my mother for Mother's Day, and a high-traffic (high-paying) non-profit organization. But unannounced hours-long database outages are inexcusably unprofessional. To think that they hope to cater to small businesses.

It is pretty clear from previous outages that it isn't a matter of a poor planned outage notification policy. They just lose control of their database systems every once in a while, and have to scramble to get them restored. I remember one outage left me with corrupt tables and resulted in lost data. DreamHost has been struggling to figure out what a high-end web host looks like on the back-end, with high traffic or poorly written software installed by customers capable of affecting other customers. Their solution to the database problem: bill per database connection, and per query (the charge calculated from a combined number they call "conuery"). I don't know of any other web host that meters database usage like this. (Do you?)

Any anti-DreamHost thread deserves a mention of Pair.com, which has competitive prices and features, and is especially known for their reliability, size and industry experience. Nobody has ever complained about Pair, and they're always overwhelmingly mentioned in "what's a good web host?" discussions.

I'm also seriously considering self-hosting over my DSL line. I worry about this option because I don't understand my usage patterns well enough to know what the line can handle, and it will inevitably be less reliable than any web host. If my server goes down, not only would I be without access to email, but emails sent to me would bounce. If I'm on vacation when it happens, there's nobody to fix it until I get back. But I'm already paying for the static IPs, I have the know-how and the hardware, and I'd enjoy the control provided by self-hosting.

I'm hardly the first to complain about or leave DreamHost because of egregious quality control problems, but I may be the next.

comments...

Jerry Kindal, April 24, 2003 3:34 AM:

I just upgraded my DSL to Speakeasy's 1.5/768 plan, and intend to bring my hosting in-house. It's my understanding that your mail won't start bouncing for some time if your server goes down; as long as there's a mail server defined in your DNS, hosts that are sending you mail will let it queue up until your host is back online -- up to several days depending on the host.



It is important that you get a lot of redundancy for your DNS, but luckily this is cheap/free (see Granite Canyon's Public DNS, MyDomains.com, etc.).

eric soroos, April 24, 2003 4:21 AM:

I've been self hosting for the last few years at work, and last couple of weeks at home on a combination of Debian/Apache/DBmail/Postgres and OSX/Fronter. While I have a very good idea of traffic and sysadmin involved, I'm not entirely happy about having everything on the end of a dsl connection (even if I did just get the upgrade too. mmmm bandwidth).



I've been thinking about a blogger coop for a little while now: a few clueful users who want something a little more than your standard hosting but can't justify getting a dedicated host on their own. Ideally, it would be with my preferred infrastructure mix (osx frontier, linux everything else) + mt/blosxom/pycs/zope/whatever. Of course my insistence on Frontier/OSX would probably triple the cost of a dedicated host. But there are probably others like me.





Dan, April 24, 2003 8:54 AM:

I wholeheartedly agree with every point you mention, and have reluctantly stayed a Dreamhost customer since 1998. Now that my own 1U server is in place, I'm going to finally transfer all of my remaining NetSol domains to Joker and transfer all of my hosting to mnet.



If you don't end up hosting your own stuff, spam me a message and we could hook you up with an account. (Debian, Apache, PHP/Perl/MySQL/PostgreSQL/full shell access, etc.) The only time the server has been downed (excluding transit time) is when I `sudo`d the wrong process at the wrong time.



I let harb handle all of the admin processes these days. :D

mike, April 24, 2003 11:15 AM:

I self-host: OS X on a ancient G3 laptop on up/down 256k DSL.



I don't think I have a bandwidth covenant in my service agreeement, but I haven't ever been slashdotted or anything.



main drawbacks:



mysterious exceptions in configurations to miscellaneous services (UW IMAP + sendmail on OSX yeilds unpredictable results) that often prove too time consuming to really nail down (presumably an OS X specific issue)



the specter of backup (a likely problem even in a hosted environment)



a g3 is a tad lightweight for some of the work it needs to do... but I can live with it.



Clear advantages:



I know why and when an outage occurs, as long as it's not on the ISP end.



storage space: no longer an issue



saves $$$



regarding mail backup: use a third-party DNS service (I use zoneedit.com, free for up to 4 domains) and define a mail service (pobox.com, whatever) as secondary mail server in the MX records. Maybe first too since pobox is so cheap.



my 2 centimes.

mike, April 25, 2003 1:39 AM:

Interesting, Eric.



lessee, we'd be looking for unlimited storage and no nasty bandwidth bills; backup and some kinda backend servicing, right?



For me personally it's mo' bettah to stick with MySQL so that I have some reason to use what the paying folks want.



Still and all it'd be neat to set up a hosting service that directly targets outrageous storage and BW limitations.



Wonder if the Trotts' new thing might address those issues. Maybe not - if that really ends up featurematching blogger, reliability and usability in MT should carry the day for them.



In which case this might be, like, a business. hm.



oh dear, now I'm going to technomuse feverishly.

Daniel Talsky, April 26, 2003 10:35 AM:

Cornerhost is pretty sublime. Michal is definately a new kid on the block, but he used to work for pair, and so he has a lot of thier touches, including a domain console so you can host unlimited multiple domains on one account. It's sweet. Plus, he's a tremendously nice guy.