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renodino (6856)

renodino
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http://www.presicient.com/
Perl Contrarian & SQL fanboy.

Here's my CPAN goods. [cpan.org]

Journal of renodino (6856)

Monday March 24, 2008
01:46 PM

"Dream"Host ? More like Nightmare

[ #35971 ]
Let me preface this by clearly stating I'm not blaming Mssr. Schwern, who has been very helpful, and a general Perl Hero. This situation certainly is not his fault, and in some sense he's as much a victim of DH as I am. But ever since I took him up on the DreamHost offer, I've been in hosting hell.

Since moving to DH, I'm confronted with

  • sloooooow page loads (that is, when the site is up), even for simple static pages with a couple images;
  • email frequently down or very slow;
  • repeated screwups with my weblogs.
  • for some odd reason, my sites (the static ones, no magic JS or server scripts) frequently cause FF 2.0.0.12 to crash...usually after trying to load the page for 10+ secs (no such problems in Safari, IE or Opera, thank god)
  • server status tester frequently reporting "heavily loaded" (can you say "oversubscribed" ?)

I never thought I'd long for a return to my old host (Earthlink), but their overpriced, restrictive plans seem like nirvana now.

So I've got to find a new host and fast. I'm looking at Pair, since they've been Perl friendly for awhile now, and they run Perl 5.8.8. More expensive, certainly, but after the DH debacle, I'd rather pay a bit more and not have to constantly run a canary to verify my sites and email are still functioning. MediaTemple is also on my radar, tho they don't appear to be as Perl friendly as Pair.

If anyone has some recommendations, please pass them along! I'd love to help "Perl bloom", but its obvious that DH is all fertilizer and no substance.

Update

After way too much research, I've jumped to BlueHost, they seem to keep their customers pretty satisfied, and have pretty much everything DH does...except the downtime. BlueHost also has a nifty little Perl package installer to pull stuff directly from cpan; I haven't tried it yet, but it should be fun to play with. But I've still got lots of site xfer chores to finish before then.

BTW, anyone whoc opened a DH account since the 1st of the year is now pretty much dead in the water. And DH's response as to when it will be back up ? "Um, don't know, maybe by the end of the week ?"

I sure hope I get my refund before they go bellyup 8^(


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  • I've been *very* happy with Linode.
    --
    rjbs
  • I've been with Pair for years and have never had any issues whatsoever. There, and having said that I've probably just totally jinxed it ;-)

    • I am pretty happy with Pair but one thing they did which really upset me was running ads on domains that I hadn't configured yet. I thought that was really unprofessional since I had paid them to host my domain.

      • Do you mean a domain you registered with pairNIC, our registrar? Anything that uses pairNIC's default nameservers and doesn't have site forwarding or custom DNS set up will point to a parking page with ads, I agree.

        Or, if you mean pairLite, our discounted service, then I believe there is a default "hosted with pairlite" index.html installed till you replace it.

        In either case, apologies to you.

        The flagship pair.com hosting service has neither of those things, and any domain configured on one of our st

        • It was a domain registered with PairNic. Overall I think your service is very good, the application is easy to navigate and easy to use. I also like the forwarding options you guys just added for web and email.

          I understand the need to bring in revenue with ads on the parked domains, but I handle registration for a few people and one of them got on my case about it because I hadn't set the dns up yet after registering it (they thought I was running the ads there).

          For what it's worth, I'm in the process o

  • Have you looked at nearlyfreespeech.net?

    • I second this, and I encourage you to ask, "Is there anything DreamHost or BlueHost offer that justifies paying ten times the cost of NFS?"

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
      • My main concern is disk space. $0.01 per megabyte-month could add up pretty quickly. I currently am using 2GB on DreamHost - that would be $20/month at NFS. Plus, in the near future, I'd like to get all my photos up and use it for some data backup.

        NFS is probably great for blogs and such but not photo galleries.

  • I've had a virtual server with linode [linode.com] for about six months, and have been very happy with it. I've even had a free RAM and HD upgrade in that time.

    For cheaper, shared hosting my previous hosts mythic beasts [mythic-beasts.com] were great. I had their basic 'shell account' - very cheap, even includes FastCGI support - and the few times I needed support, they provided a good, personal service.

  • Check out pairlite.com - it is pair but cheaper, you just loose the live support (email only).
  • For me DreamHost fills the following niche.

    * Cheaper than a virtual.

    * 90% of the features I need (svn servers, cron, shell)

    * Unreachable disk and traffic limits.

    * Control panel that doesn't suck.

    * As many domains and shell users as I want.

    It's a great place to shove lots and lots and lots of generic or bulky stuff where CPU doesn't matter, distribute large binary packages, hold all my system backups, store my SVN repositories (except for svn.ali.as) and general get stuff done.

    It is, however, NOT the place w
    • I realize its discount shared hosting. But thus far, DH has had serious problems delivering simple static pages, not to mention email. Even discount shared hosting has certain minimum requirements. A great config panel isn't much use if no one can view your website. E.g., in response to everyone's support tickets for the *latest* issue, the response included this happy little tidbit (posted on 3/23):

      Some of you are also asking when this issue will be fixed, I wish I had concrete information for you, but i

      • Oh, and I forgot to mention, Bluehost has perl 5.8.8! w00t!

        Alas, they don't appear to have SVN...

        • I have to say though, bluehost look very very good.

          In comparison to DH, I get IMAP and Postgres, at the loss of SVN.

          So if I moved all my svn repos over to my virtual host, I could probably get the rest into bluehost pretty easily.
        • Looks like BlueHost has had their share of problems as well.

          For example: http://mattheaton.com/?p=115 [mattheaton.com]
          • Yes, I noted some of BH's issues. But relative to DH's disasters, those seem like minor hiccups. And Mssr. Heaton's response was certainly more like a responsible CEO than the script kiddie, yuk-it-up [dreamhost.com] behavior at DH.

            FWIW: I did note a bit of slowness at BH this AM, a quick ps -ef|wc -l indicated a high process count (well, high in BH terms; on my DH server, they were mid-low end numbers...) but things have since settled down.

            I also noted, when transferring the website tarball to BH, that the tarball unbun

      • I assume I've been relatively lucky, because only one of the outages impacted me, and that's the first time I've seen it go down in the entire time I've been hosting there.

        I do see nigglies though, that makes me doubt some of their back-end competency.

        Archived log files that don't get chowned and are stuck as owned by root.

        Root-owned site paths no cleaned up when websites are dropped.

        Etc etc... No major impacts, but certainly warnings signs.

        And they are hiring a Perl coder. I'd almost be curious to go do a
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