I joined Dreamhost in November of 2006. I'd been hosting GLBT Fantasy at home and figured I could save some money by switching to Dreamhost's shared hosting plan. I mean, how can you possibly go wrong hosting a hobby website for $10 a month? Let me count the ways.
1) Built-in downtime. It's not a bug, it's a feature!
As someone who knows my way around a UNIX command line, the thought of a website going down on a regular basis was disturbing. The first time I couldn't connect to my site, I fired off a concerned ticket to Dreamhost: something is very wrong, my website is down! Then it happened a second time, then a third. Each time I dutifully filled out a ticket, but never got a satisfactory answer from the help desk. Every response was a variation on either "it's your fault" or "sorry, we've fixed it." But the site kept going down.
Further research dissolved any remaining illusions I had about the benefits of shared hosting. The business model appears to be based on overselling—and it's not just Dreamhost. These companies host far more clients than their hardware can comfortably accommodate, and when compromises need to be made they come in the form of slow connections and frequent reboots. So my website was intentionally going down as often as 35 times a month, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for half a day. I didn't realize how extensive it was until I started using a free monitoring service.
I found it irritating, but another built-in part of the business model seems to be based on social conditioning: how can I possibly complain when I'm only paying $10 a month? The alternative was some form of dedicated hosting which can cost upwards of $50 a month. I grudgingly decided to accept the situation, trading reliability for price. But Dreamhost had even more compromises in store for its loyal customers.
2) Security breaches.
In June of 2007, Dreamhost announced that 3,500 accounts had been compromised due to an FTP security flaw. Websites had been defaced as early as May with no official admission from Dreamhost. I wasn't one of those affected, but just knowing I'd been at risk was a lot to forgive on top of the frequent downtime. I backed up my site, changed my passwords, and started looking for a new host. Unfortunately it would take me until the end of August to find one, and then I had to wait more than four months on a waiting list to open an account—just long enough for me to experience the next Dreamhost debacle.
3) Overbilling.
In January of 2008 Dreamhost overcharged every single one of their customers whose accounts were set to autobill through a credit or debit card—including mine. How? Nothing short of gross incompetence. In total, they overcharged their customers by $7.6 million. Compounding even that breathtaking violation of trust, Dreamhost decided to make a jolly old joke about it.
I was astonished. It's one thing to ask me to accept the fact that my hobby site won't always be available, or that I may lose my data. It's another to recklessly tamper with my finances. I've been shopping online for over a decade and I've never, ever had a vendor abuse my credit card in such a manner. The situation was appalling and their response insulting. At the very least, they deserve to be on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit.
And so ends my nightmare with Dreamhost. I've been a customer for less than a year and a half, and in a few hours I will be shutting down my account for good. This site has already been hosted elsewhere for the last month—without a single second of downtime.
If you ever encounter someone endorsing Dreamhost, apologizing for Dreamhost, defending Dreamhost, or making excuses for Dreamhost, ask them if they're a Dreamhost affiliate. A dutiful army of such affiliates—making percentage commissions on accounts opened with their coupon codes—seem to target review sites and blog comments in an effort to keep Dreamhost's reputation squeaky clean.
I wish I could recommend a cheap, reliable alternative for webmasters in my position, but I can't. Since I'm involved in other projects besides GLBT Fantasy, I decided to go with a more expensive VPS hosting plan—twice the cost of Dreamhost. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford to do that.
All I can say is, don't use Dreamhost. Their staff aren't just irritatingly flip, they're incompetent to the point of damaging the people unlucky enough to have trusted them. For that reason, I cannot recommend Dreamhost even for hobbyists. Who knows what further disaster looms on the horizon for their customers?
One thing is for certain: You are putting yourself at risk by using Dreamhost services.
March 24, 2008
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