Dreamhost Has Problems and I Love Them!
This and most of my other sites are hosted by Dreamhost on a great shared-hosting plan. They have excellent prices, good support, and plans that include most features you could want. The main Dreamhost blog betrays their great sense of humor and keeps us regularly entertained.
Crap Happens
However, there were Dreamhost DNS problems a few days ago that were driving some people bonkers — myself included. The initial report and the followup post generated 127 then 468 comments, respectively. A few months ago they had a power problem that caused issues for a few days as well.
The DNS problems currently seem to be resolved. Their last status update on it provides the explanation.
The problems regarding dns and our load balancer have been resolved. It was a combination of problems that caused the outage. The main problem was that the default udp settings on the load balancer did not have any timeout values set (BAD!!!). This was causing any udp connections that didn’t complete to fill up connection tables on the load balancer causing its CPU to spike and stop serving new requests. We sincerely apologize for this outage and are working on new dreaplans that would prevent a similar outage in the future.
Thanks to Dreamhost for sticking with this issue until it was diagnosed and fixed.
Dreamhoststatus.com provides a mechanism for them to report issues and absorb the caustic comments of those affected (some of whom are really competitors fishing for new customers). I appreciate their candor and know they’re focusing on doing what they can to fix the problems.
Since they just passed the 500,000 site mark, I have to give them kudos for managing things so well, and just wish there was something they could do to better avoid these occasional outages. Can they invest in more redundant systems? Dunno, but it would make a lot of people sleep easier.
Is Dreamhost The Best Host?
In the past, I have used other hosts. They have cost more, offered less, and had more problems than Dreamhost.
Nevertheless, I occasionally look at other hosts with other plans. Sometimes they have impressive prices; but maybe they only support .com, .net, and .org domains. Sometimes they have great features and prices; but maybe they limit the number of domains you can have. Sometimes I get restless; but Dreamhost makes tweaks things a bit or their blog makes me laugh or they solve a problem quickly, and I stay put.
In the future, my mind may change about Dreamhost or some other company may offer something better, but for now I use and recommend them whole-heartedly.
Anything Better?
But you tell me. What’s your favorite host? Why? Or if you have had problems with Dreamhost, what were they? Educate me. I haven’t used every feature or crawled into every nook and cranny of the service, so there might be a glaring problem that I haven’t encountered.
Update: Coupon Code
If you use the coupon code F7DJS8, you can get 10 Bucks Off when you sign up as a new customer.
