Dream hosting... A nightmare?

raveoli · 2006-11-29 13:55:04

Phew… I switched from Dreamhost to MediaTemple, as I was much impressed with the concept behind their new Grid server. But damn has it been a sour ride; unstable database connections all over and regular downtime. Yesterday it was down for more than an hour, and today also. And I’m talking email as well – everything was down down down.

As if that’s not enough, one of my clients called me today and told me his bank statement shows Textdrive has billed him $149 – even though he was only a client there for a few days, at which point we settled on a refund, because the whole experience with Textdrive had been below any acceptable level of service: The activation was slow. The support was slow (1 day) and nothing in the backend worked. So he got his money back, and arrividerci, auf wiedersehen Textdrive, we’re never coming back. The whole thing was settled, yet they charged him now, a year after. We’ve not heard a single word from them during that year otherwise.

Weird.

Reason I’m telling this, is because I’m really starting to wonder – is there a decent, popular, much-hyped host?

I chose Textdrive for my client because I wanted him to have the best. I had heard Textdrive was oh-so-ever-good, yet they were plainly the worst host I’ve ever tried.

And now, MediaTemple “offers” hours upon hours of downtime and inconvenience, for a $20 premium per month.

What’s up with that?

Walker · 2006-11-29 15:08:34

I dunno, I have servers with MT, Textdrive, SegPub, and some random smaller companies. The random smaller ones are the ones that give me the most problems.

Personally, I want to go MT all the way, but that might take awhile.

marios · 2006-11-29 15:36:10

I am looking for a decent hosting reseller account as well.
( I think Textdrive is pretty decent to put your own stuff there, but 700 of unpredictable Users, that might bring the Server down at any time, is a little worth to think about. But the Service is not that bad, yet the promised super duper Admin Panel never came, but Strongspace instead. However, I am not angry about it. )
Something with an easy click and go admin panel (but no c-panel), where you can just sign up Users click and go and finish, and get some percentages.

regards, marios

hcgtv · 2006-11-29 15:42:35

Oliver,

My route to enlightenment has taken me from self hosting, to shared hosting and finally to a VPS.

In the beginning I ran all my sites from the box that sits next to my desk, my sites got popular, bandwidth couldn’t keep up. So I went looking at shared hosting, rather than name names, let’s just say that in 6 months I tried two of them, very disappointed. I kept looking at my home server and wondering when we’d get decent upload bandwidth to the home. Then I started looking at a VPS, I found that Xen was the best and I found a small outfit I liked and moved my sites there.

Twelve months later and I’m very happy with my VPS, uptime has been great, only two burps to report in a year. Three weeks ago I did a restart on the VPS, takes but a few minutes, before that it had been running for 170 plus days without incident. This is an unmanaged VPS, as in I manage it, they keep the hardware humming along.

I truly believe that with virtualization maturing, the future is inexpensive VPS solutions. It’s where you have the most control over your environment and some errant script from somebody else’s public_html ain’t gonna bring you down also.

michaelkpate · 2006-11-29 17:36:04

Chris Pirillo wrote about the Media Temple Outage.

I tried virtual hosting at Bytemark for a while but administering my own server just got to be too big a hassle. So now I have sites at Textdrive (a lifetime VC2 account), DreamHost (a DreamMonster account that I just renewed for another two years), and LISHost.com (part of a partnership). Early on, the performance at Textdrive was miserable, but they have seemed to deal with all the issues there ages ago. Dreamhost has always offered solid performance. I had been curious about MT but just didn’t see the need for it at this point.

From my own experiences and what I read from other people, it tends to be a matter of luck more than anything else. Getting provisioned on the right server (which no one ever has any control over) seems to make all the difference.

jakob · 2006-11-29 19:54:40

Paul Jarvis of TwoThirty has also written of his Media Temple woes with the Grid Server and had a chorus of similar replies. They are all from around the same time so it could be that things even out but…

ramanan · 2006-11-29 21:07:44

I actually just switched TOO dreamhost. Why did you switch away?

raveoli · 2006-11-30 13:16:59

Ramanan >
A few reasons as to why I switched:
I was overall satisfied with Dreamhost – though they did have some periods recently with permanently slow pageloads… However, I didn’t like working in their ugly-ass adminpanel. I’m a sucker for clean aesthetics.

And I was about to start building a mac-community website in response to the obvious opportunity it is when the established mac-community website in Denmark (Macnyt.dk) had to waive the white flag and surrender, take the site down for maintenance, because of server overload.

Therefore I figured, well, MediaTemple’s new Grid server should alleviate exactly that problem – with the Grid server I can rest assured my comepeting solution will not go down periodically, like my competitors website did;-) Apparantly, I’m now doing just as badly as he does now, with my MediaTemple problems everyday.

I’m starting to perceive it this way; a host is like any other relationship. The grass is often greener on the other side of the fence. But it all comes down to the fact that no partner is perfect, and never will be. There will always be arguments. can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

It seems one has to find the partner that makes you be able to stand them even though there’s trouble and high waves, discussions and problems.

I’ve found a friendly attitude is what matters there. If you’re friends, you can forgive. But friends treat each other with respect.

Applying that analogy to hosting partnerships, I must say I’ve liked the support-response from Dreamhost as well as Livehost.net – but even then; Yesterday I had to unlock my friends domain at the current registrar, Gotonames.com which is a product of Livehost.net – and since I could not figure out how to unlock it, in order to transfer it elsewhere, I wrote them a support ticket. I waited and waited. Then I went to bed. This morning I see they have simply closed the support ticket with no other notification than “will be re-opened”… Aha! When suckers? I need this domain up’n‘running now.

As you can see, it really is like nobody’s perfect. Seen from the philosophical viewpoint. But realistically, I did expect MediaTemple to be better than Dreamhost! I pay them twice as much. They have a better reputation, and a high-class no-bargain brand image to keep up and trustworthy.

Last edited by raveoli (2006-11-30 13:18:25)

raveoli · 2006-11-30 13:19:59

jakob wrote:

Paul Jarvis of TwoThirty has also written of his Media Temple woes with the Grid Server and had a chorus of similar replies. They are all from around the same time so it could be that things even out but…

The comments are not from the same time/date. I’ve been following that thread. The date is just a bug on his website.

squaredeye · 2006-12-02 00:15:18

I’m planning on switching from Dreamhost for downtime issues, along with a “host” of other problems over the last six months. They were nice folks, but it just wasn’t worth it.

Ace of Dubs · 2006-12-02 15:11:40

I too was disappointed with Mediatemple. The service just never met up with the hype. I spoke with them on the phone a few times and did not like their rude attitude at all. Plus their admin panel, while pretty is a bit unintuitive with all those pop-up windows. Meh..was not impressed.

Right now I am using Dreamhost as a nice, cheap sandbox for all my dev stuff (and tons of storage). They have definitely had their ups and downs, but I must say they have been very responsive in the last few months. My servers have gone down twice and were back up within hours of me emailing them. Still, I wouldnt dare put any mission-critical apps on Dreamhost…too risky IMHO.

Right now I am using www.downtownhost.com and www.belahost.com for serious stuff. The staff are friendly/knowledgable and customer support via livechat has been great (Downtown a little better since they are online 24/7) In about 6-8 months, I have not noticed one instance of downtime and my sites run blazing fast. The best part is that both hosts are cheaper than MT! You dont always get what you pay for it seems.

If you are interested in researching more quality hosts, I found Downtown at www.thehostguru.com (who incidentially just wrote an article on Mediatemple’s grid woes.)

Good luck with your search dude.. I know what a harrowing experience it can be to find a decent host.

Last edited by Ace of Dubs (2006-12-02 15:12:21)

slim · 2006-12-03 01:28:25

@Ace: How do downtownhost and belahost do with textpattern? Are they up to speed on all the PHP and SQL? Any features you find particularly useful?

What are some urls you run off these hosts? I am interested to see an example of “blazing fast”.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2006-11-29 13:55:04

Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#2 2006-11-29 15:08:34

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#3 2006-11-29 15:36:10

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#4 2006-11-29 15:42:35

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#5 2006-11-29 17:36:04

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#6 2006-11-29 19:54:40

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#7 2006-11-29 21:07:44

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#8 2006-11-30 13:16:59

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#9 2006-11-30 13:19:59

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#10 2006-12-02 00:15:18

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#11 2006-12-02 15:11:40

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

#12 2006-12-03 01:28:25

Re: Dream hosting... A nightmare?

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