Why DreamHost? I’ll tell you why!

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Promo Code: 411a for a free domain name for one year with registration.

I have had a new people ask my “Why did you leave Media Temple?”.

Well to put it softly, I was unhappy. I moved to Media Temple about 4 years ago. I was at a host with a reseller account so i could manage multiple domain names, and at the time that was really the only way to do it. When Media Temple lowered there prices and offered Unlimited Domains for lightly less than i was paying i was glad to move. After all if its good enough for Sony, Nike, and Starbucks it should be good enough for me.

I didn’t have many problems in the beginning, nothing to crazy. The up time was great speed seamed decent. That was until this last year. I had a site completely disappear, At a charge of $10 an hour i could have my site restored from 2 week old backups. I was lucky and found an archive file under another domain name. I was told they cant create archives, i thought that was strange since i was able to make them. Nothing in there logs indicated this action even took place.

Next think i knew i was getting intermittent 500 Internal Server Error. Nothings changing on my end and of course it never happened when support had a look.

Next was the incredibly slow page load times. I’m talking 15-30 seconds to load the main page of my site. This i was told was doe to WordPress Plugins. I already use page caching but considered there could be a rouge plugin aching for server domination.
Alas this was not the case.

I had the same slow load times for other sites i have and even a simple php file with a few functions on it.

I then did a Full page load test from Pingdom ad recommended by one of the support techs. When i gave the results to them i was told it was in accurate because they don’t have control over routing to my own internet connection. I pointed out that previously that day i downloaded Ubuntu at 15mb/sec from my work computer (were i ran the test). By the way the green is the time you make the connection to the time you receive the first byte of date. i was sitting at about 7 seconds for the initial request.

By now I’m feeling like WordPress is out to get me and my internet connection is slow.

I wanted to install Trac but found i could get about 50% of the way and then hit a wall were i didn’t have permissions. Then i wanted to play to Django, but then i needed to pay another $20 to have it run in a container. Or i could pay $50 for a better server to do both. Ya no thanks.

Looking at the account details i noticed MySQL 5 is advertised, i thought well that’s interesting i have 4.7, support said i would haveto register a new account and migrate everything over on my own. Only new accounts get MySQL5. Poo on you!

It took One viewer of my site who said that my demo addressbook was really cool but super slow. The next day my mom was looking at photos of my son and she even said it was slow.

When i worked at nForm they have there sites hosted at Dream Host and i was always impressed with the speed of the sites. I considered moving to Dream Host many times but just didn’t want to deal with the hassle of transferring.

But when i was tired and fed up. I archived my sites using tar -cvvf home.tar home/ (something i couldn’t do) downloaded all contend and dumped my databases.

I was up and running at Dream Host in about an hour (including decompressing all 2.4 gigs of archives and importing my Databases). For the most part everything works, and things that broke, well its my own fault for using register globals! [Smacks Wrist]

So now I’m paying $10 a month, i have Trac installed, I can install Django and it didn’t cost my anything. Support actually reads the request and gets back to me with a useful answer.

So how do i like Dream Host so far? Well so far i haven’t had any issues. My site loads much faster, the i tested the servers grunt work by creating 300 thumbnails in about 11 seconds. That took 45 on Media Temples site the day before. I must say I’m very happy, i have ready many other good reviews of Dream Host and have read a few general observations of Media Temples performance slippage.

Since i have been with DreamHost i have recommended it to 2 other people, both signed up the next day. Price really cant be beat, and you get practically EVERYTHING! and if you don’t have it most likely you can install it your self.

Extra Reading:
http://timothyfletcher.com/journal/posts/media-temples-gridservice-not-that-good-really

I’m including a promo code 411a Enter and get a free domain name for one year.

http://www.dreamhost.com/