My First…

Yes, I will admit it, Dreamhost was my first. I purchased my domain with them as well as hosted thenullpointer.net with them. As I'm sure others will testify about their first experience, it wasn't painless.

• Initial domain registration and hosting was delayed five days due to the automated scripts Dreamhost used. My domain wasn't registered and it took five days to get Dreamhost to fix it.
• Server uptime wasn't what it was supposed to be¹
• Servers were constantly down/unavailable or had crazy insane load levels
• New features were initially broken for months. Take SVN for example. Broke my domain for a short time, constantly breaking²
• Some software was upgraded without any kind of notice. For example the PHP version was upgraded and broke a small portion of Discovr³
• SLOW, sometimes Dreamhost is incredibly slow. My simple WordPress blog has taken up to 30 seconds to render. 30 seconds! That is unacceptable.
• False Accusations… Accused of spamming. Yes, Discovr has been accused of spamming. Even though the accusation was complete BS I had to do a code audit and assure Dreamhost that I had removed the offending spamming code from Discovr in order to have my account re-enabled. The best part was that when I asked for proof or an example of the spam (so I could try and pinpoint the problem) they couldn't provide me anything.

Can't Complain…Can I?

I guess I cannot complain too much. My first year of hosting was a whopping $7.95 + thenullpointer.net domain⁴. Not too shabby, considering the normal cost was $9.95. I could put up with a bit of trouble. The next year I used a coupon⁵ for another year of cheap(er) hosting service. Again, the same problems, nothing changed… for such a cheap price, I can't complain… can I?

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

My paid-for hosting service with Dreamhost is coming to an end in June and I wasn't sure if I should stay with Dreamhost. I wondered if I was just one of the people having trouble with Dreamhost. Google provided me the answer.

Decision: Leave

Enter The Slicehost

Let me just quote a portion of Slicehost's homepage:

We’re just like you. Sick of oversold, underperforming, greedy hosting companies, we took matters into our own hands. We built a hosting company for people who know their stuff. Give us a box, give us bandwidth, give us performance and we get to work. Quad processor machines, RAID1 drives, Tier-1 bandwidth and root access. Managed with a customized Xen VPS backend to ensure that your resources are protected and guaranteed.

Ok, so it sounds good, right? Yep! It sounds like exactly what I was looking for. It costs roughly double what Dreamhost does per year⁶ but you have complete control over your server and guaranteed resources.

After the initial waiting period of 2.5 weeks⁷ I had my own little 256Slice. I have had my 256Slice for 10 days; As of writing this post the uptime is at 10 days⁸.

Thus far I really like Slicehost. They have been helpful in IRC, seem very helpful in the forums, and seem pretty honest overall. Something I cannot say about Dreamhost⁹

I have 20 more days to cancel Slicehost and receive a full refund but hopefully I will not be doing that. All the reviews of Slicehost have been very positive; hopefully my experience will be as well. I'll keep this post (or others) updated with my Slicehost experience.

Cliff Notes

• Transferred thenullpointer.net¹⁰ from Dreamhost to Godaddy.
• Transferred thenullpointer.net¹¹ from Dreamhost to Slicehost.
• Profit Decided Slicehost is good.

1. The server would restart randomly and/or without notice [↩]
2. It liked to break during my Informatics Capstone development [↩]
3. No notice meant a lot of non-existant-bug-hunting [↩]
4. Yes, $7.95 for the entire year, plus a free domain [↩]
5. OMGHI2U1 for $97 off [↩]
6. When you pay $9.95/month for Dreamhost [↩]
7. Due to high demand [↩]
8. Last I checked, my Dreamhost server was at 4 days [↩]
9. Although I did enjoy Dreamhosts' random-topic newsletters and blog. [↩]
10. the domain [↩]
11. webhosting [↩]