147 Comments

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1. 1

   I can attest to this guys’ good intentions, superb support, and unbelievable deals.

   I had one of my accounts go over the limit for CPU minutes (stupid magpie) a while ago, and instead of disabling that account, they advised me and gave me information (and time) to handle the issue, which I did.

   You guys rock!

   PS: I only wish you offered VPS too!

   Comment by Ivan V. — May 18, 2006 #

2. 2

   Dreamhost has a reputation for disabling sites based on MySQL queries, without explanation or warning. There’s a Last Comment plugin for Wordpress that has caused a lot of trouble.

   Comment by Steven Fisher — May 18, 2006 #

3. 3

   Is overselling the reason, Dreamhost gets a F rating from Better Business Bureau ?

   http://www.labbb.org/BBBWeb/Forms/Business/CompanyReportPage_Expository.aspx?CompanyID=13131294

   Comment by S Jain — May 18, 2006 #

4. 4

   I just emailed the LA BBB that their grade seems about 3 letters short. (no, their grade shouldn’t be an “I”)

   I keep hearing that having a dedicated server gets me better support, but honestly it seemed pretty good back when I was on a chepassed plan and I havnt seen much of a change.

   DH has been rock solid ever since I started with them.

   on an unrelated but funny note, if you go to file a complaint and put in http://www.labbb.org for the website, it turns up 3 hits for a coffey shop and none for the labbb ;)

   Comment by Nathan Friedly — May 18, 2006 #

5. 5

   Great post Josh!

   Entertaining and informative at the same time - isn’t that overselling?

   Comment by Unofficial DreamHost Blog — May 18, 2006 #

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   I okay with your reflexions. You maybe forgot to mention the technical progression which makes the harddisks cost less an lesser.

   Comment by not important — May 19, 2006 #

7. 7

   Hosting Review Payola…

   This is funny. Dreamhost, the cheap but imperfect hosts of this blog, have a blog of their own. And in a recent entry, DreamHost Blog | Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry, they describe their correspondence with a supposedly neutral and objective service tha…

   Trackback by Discourse.net — May 19, 2006 #

8. 8

   I’ve had no problems in the year I’ve had Dreamhost. They have fixed all issues in a timely manner. It’s unfortunate to see a good webhost have a poor BBB rating though…

   Comment by DanGarion — May 19, 2006 #

9. 9

   Talking of over-selling, are you planning on giving us some feedback on the downtime with rails sites all day today? Coming after the botched upgrade to 1.1, having ruby lib installed at

   /usr/local/lib/ruby/ruby/

   on all your machines isn’t great. I keep checking dreamhoststatus.com for answers (or even a statement of the problem) but none are forthcoming.

   Yes BBB is a joke (I think you should be proud of the F : ), but a bit more transparency and feedback in the day to day operations of dreamhost would go a long way, particularly when things go wrong.

   Comment by Kenny — May 19, 2006 #

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    Give me a break. I looked at the rating explation for what an F means, and it says that an F means “We strongly question the company’s reliability for reasons such as that they have failed to respond to complaints, their advertising is grossly misleading, they are not in compliance with the law’s licensing or registration requirements, their complaints contain especially serious allegations, or the company’s industry is known for its fraudulent business practices.” (Emphasis mine.)

    How can you give an individual business an F based on its industry? That’s absurd.

    The only bad mark that Dreamhost has in their evaluation is that they’ve failed to respond to the BBB about some complaints raised. They state that Dreamhost gave proper consideration to the complaints they did hear back about. They state that there are no concerns about the truth of their advertising, nor have there been any government actions taken against them.

    In short, the justification for their F grade seems to be that Dreamhost didn’t call them up and tell them what they did to resolve some of the complaints made and that Dreamhost happens to be in an industry that suffers from fraud.

    What a joke.

    Comment by David — May 19, 2006 #

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    Thanks for clearing some stuff about CPU limits and overselling. I am on WHT but I am always supporting Dreamhost!

    The thing I don’t understand is, if a hosting company like Dreamhost gives you vast amounts of space and bandwidth for a low price, shouldn’t the reason be because Dreamhost can offer tons of servers and thus give customers more space?

    Of course, the companies with only 3 servers cannot compete with Dreamhosts’s 700 servers. Those are the companies who keep saying that you are overselling!

    If Dreamhost were really overselling, they should’ve been out of business now but look! they are still here and people like them and SO DO I.

    :)

    Comment by Sara — May 19, 2006 #

12. 12

    CPU sharing: I’d really like to see dreamhost set up a pooled round-robin shared server set up. All the files are *already* stored on a shared file server, and the machines are all configured by script anyway, so why not have a pool of, say, 10 machines for a group of sites? The hard part (the filer backend) is already done and it would help sites scale much better, and eliminate the problem of any one site monopolizing a shared server’s CPU.

    Comment by Kallahar — May 19, 2006 #

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    > In short, the justification for their F grade seems to be that Dreamhost didn’t
    > call them up and tell them what they did to resolve some of the complaints
    > made and that Dreamhost happens to be in an industry that suffers from
    > fraud.

    This is exactly what the deal is.

    While in the past we bought into their program, since then we’ve pretty much not bothered to officially respond to BBB complaints (even if we did resolve the matter directly with the customer). In our view the matter is between us, our customer, and the 10,000 or so people who read that customer’s weblog. :>

    The fact is, in the nearly 9 years we’ve been in business we’ve somehow amassed a total of 11 complaints that - according to the BBB web site - haven’t been resolved (which is probably untrue). Eleven. That’s a rather small number of complaints for a company as old as ours. Sadly, I can probably name more than that many disgruntled ex-customers by name.

    Basically, if someone is using the BBB site to help choose a web host, they’re not getting even close to an accurate picture. The BBB doesn’t know anything about web hosting, and there’s no way that you can get an accurate view of a company based on what they have to say - it’s just too small of a sample size, and you never the words of those people who’ve hosted with us for over half a decade and are happy as clams.

    We’re not really interested in propping up the image of the BBB as some sort of consumer crusader. They’re a business like anyone else, and not one that seems all that useful for their stated purpose (in our opinion).

    Anyhow… If someone has a concern about our services, they should come to us and resolve it. Usually, that works great, and they end up happy. If you try this and still think we’re lame and would like us to go bankrupt, post about it on your weblog, tell the hosting review sites (who already hate us after the last weblog post), tell your friends, etc. It’s word of mouth from actual customers that will make or break a company, and to that end I think we’ve done remarkably well.

    Comment by Jeff C. — May 19, 2006 #

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    This sure is a popular comment section! A few responses…

    (Sara)
    > The thing I don’t understand is, if a hosting company like Dreamhost gives
    > you vast amounts of space and bandwidth for a low price, shouldn’t the
    > reason be because Dreamhost can offer tons of servers and thus give
    > customers more space?

    In the end, we still provide our customers with what they pay for. If a customer wants to fill up their disk space and utilize their bandwidth, they can. The end result, to the customer, is that they can use it if they need it and we won’t give them grief over it. Ultimately, this is what matters - that no customer is turned away.

    The most pertinent thing he said, I think, is this:

    “We keep our file servers 90% full at all times, and our peak traffic times at 85% of our capacity”

    This means that on the whole we always have more disk space than we need, and that even during high usage periods we still have bandwidth to spare.

    > Of course, the companies with only 3 servers cannot compete with
    > Dreamhosts’s 700 servers. Those are the companies who keep saying
    > that you are overselling!

    None of these companies, as far as I know, have any sort of inside knowledge about how our business is structured - but I can see their motivation in talking up “overselling” (I sort of disagree with Josh on the definition of that term, by the way - as long as we can provide what people are paying for, I don’t think we’ve oversold anything, just managed our resources well).

    What it comes down to, really, are economies of scale. We’ve gotten larger over the years, so our ability to provide stuff more cheaply has increased (buying in bulk helps a lot). The littler guys - which we used to be one of - don’t have that advantage. It also helps that certain costs (bandwidth and disk space) have dropped precipitously and we are able to pass those savings along to our customers.

    Just as an all-you-can-eat buffet realistically need to keep enough macaroni on hand to cover just in case _everyone_ ate as much as they humanly could, we don’t need to have that much disk space or bandwidth on hand. It’s even better when you consider that we’ll never actually run out of macaroni, and - in the case of bandwidth consumption - we can add more with nary even a phone call.

    …

    (Steven Fisher)
    > Dreamhost has a reputation for disabling sites based on MySQL queries,
    > without explanation or warning. There’s a Last Comment plugin for
    > Wordpress that has caused a lot of trouble.

    This would probably fall under the blanket of ‘CPU usage’, as certain MySQL queries are extremely inefficient and can - all by themselves - kill a database server.

    Ultimately, our job isn’t just to provide stuff at a low cost - it’s also to keep sites up and running. If any customers’ site disproportionately impacts other customers in a negative way, we reserve the right to disable it immediately (usually just until the problem is fixed, ie. by changing the MySQL query to use indexes, etc). While as a matter of necessity we may not be able to give you any warning, we _should_ let you know shortly after this is done so that you have a chance to deal with it. If not, that’s not right on our part.

    I think this compares favorably to many other hosts, who will just disable the account. The whole “limbo” system, while imperfect, allows for customers to get things fixed up without greatly impacting our customer basis while still keeping their sites up.

    …

    (Kallahar)
    > CPU sharing: I’d really like to see dreamhost set up a pooled round-robin
    > shared server set up.

    That’s an excellent idea, and something we’ve already done with some of our other services (mail being the most obvious one to customers). There are a fair number of technical roadblocks that make this non-trivial, but our admins are always looking into this sort of thing.

    Comment by Jeff C. — May 19, 2006 #

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    [...] 剛剛看到 DreamHost Blog 的 The Truth About Overselling! 這篇，突然想起有些積了很久的東西要寫 :p [...]

    Pingback by DreamHost 的 CPU 限制 at Gea-Suan Lin’s BLOG — May 19, 2006 #

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    Its hillarious listening to you hardcore emo nerds talk about obscure DH ‘failings’ for CPU minute limits, which I’d image 0.5% of customers actually are concerned with.

    Simple solution: if you want extra-ordinary features and service which goes beyond the ‘reasonable’ needs of a customer, get your own dedicated server. Stop pathetically whining on a blog comment system for a low cost shared virtual hosting service.

    Comment by Nathan — May 19, 2006 #

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    “Its hillarious listening to you hardcore emo nerds talk about obscure DH ‘failings’”

    It’s also hilarious to read trolls replying to posts that haven’t actually been made :P

    Comment by Shish — May 19, 2006 #

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    Dreamhost seems OK as long as technical issues are concerned but I’m not going to spend a penny to a company which hosts such sites as redwatch.info …

    Comment by Kimi — May 21, 2006 #

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    Kimi - dude, that is the silliest reason I have ever heard for not hosting with a hosting company. So you want a host to look at every customers site and remove all that offend you, even though they aren’t against the law? I can guarantee that every website on the internet has at least ONE person it offends, so therefore time to close the internets!

    Comment by Shorty — May 21, 2006 #

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    What is the technical feasibility of somehow networking the machines’ resources in a way that allows them to all act as more of a super computer?

    I mean, CPU (and possible RAM) is clearly the achilles heel in Dreamhost’s ability to host popular forums and such, so finding a way to lessen the effect would be excellent. It’d also provide a massive advantage (apart from the bandwidth and disk space) over shared hosting providers.

    It’d make it a lot easier for me to recommend what is a very good host in every other way to people if I didn’t know in the back of my mind that hosting a successful forum would basically cripple them. Of course, once again, I have no idea of what the technical implications of this are.

    Comment by Jolt — May 21, 2006 #

21. 21

    [...] 1. The Truth About Overselling 2. Webhosting’s Dirty Laundry tags: dreamhost, linux, overselling, hosting Bookmark on del.icio.us [...]

    Pingback by Jeff “zemote” O’Hara » Blog Archive » Dreamhost — May 22, 2006 #

22. 22

    [...] Recentemente a DreamHost publicou em seu blog um artigo muito interessante (The Truth About Overselling, abordando um assunto que eu próprio gostaria de abordar há mais tempo. [...]

    Pingback by Lucrando na Rede » Blog Archive » Hospedagem Web e Overselling — May 22, 2006 #

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    This business model has put 100’s of hosting companies bigger then dreamhost out of business because they complete only on price or volume alone. It is sad that the company can not come up with a better marketing plan then overselling.

    Comment by Blah — May 22, 2006 #

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    We appreciate and respect Kimi’s right to choose her host based on the issues she feels are important to her.

    DreamHost strongly believes in the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees its citizens freedom of speech and freedom of the press, among other things (both of which can apply to websites.) We made a business decision long ago to value freedom of speech above any potential offense someone might take over the content of a site hosted by us.

    To slightly modify a motto I once saw, the difficulty of liberty is not “I must be free”, but “That other jerk must be free as well.” (David Gerisch, I believe.)

    Comment by Pete — May 22, 2006 #

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    > This business model has put 100’s of hosting companies bigger
    > then dreamhost out of business because they complete only on
    > price or volume alone. It is sad that the company can not come
    > up with a better marketing plan then overselling.

    Comment by Jeff C. — May 22, 2006 #

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    > This business model has put 100’s of hosting companies bigger
    > then dreamhost out of business because they complete only on
    > price or volume alone. It is sad that the company can not come
    > up with a better marketing plan then overselling.

    Were we only competing on price and/or volume alone, you’d have a point - but that’s not the case at all. We have long implemented features that our competition hadn’t even heard of at the time, and have a rather loyal following. While I can’t give out numbers, I can say that our financials don’t fit the mold of a company losing money hand over fist in an effort to grow fast and outmuscle the competition.

    That sort of thinking is sooo 1999, it’s not even funny. We’re not doing that.

    I think if you look at the complaints regarding CPU minute usage, for example, one thing becomes very clear: A company that works as you describe wouldn’t even care - it’d be much easier to allow scripts to run amok and impact other customers. We’ve spent many man-hours developing a system that prevents that from happening, even if it makes a few heavy-usage account owners unhappy and loses us some business.

    We’ve been around for coming up on a decade now - practically forever in web hosting industry years. We’re privately held, profitable, and are growing organically (albeit pretty fast). I can’t speak those other guys’ business plans, but you can rest assured that we’re not going anywhere.

    Comment by Jeff C. — May 22, 2006 #

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    Another clear flaw of overselling is that it attracts sites that use more space and bandwidth. Instead of having those small sites that do not use the space and bandwidth that you claim you do. You are and will continue to attract customers who use up a lot of space, bandwidth, CPU and RAM.

    Your system for watching the servers sounds impressive but I will not even begin the conversation of support overselling as that would open a new can of worms.

    Comment by Blah — May 22, 2006 #

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    For what it’s worth… if the BBB gave DreamHost an F, I’d hate to see their rating for the last hosting company I was with. There just aren’t enough letters in the alphabet for that.

    Comment by Larry Gilbert — May 23, 2006 #

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    The one thing I find odd about CPU minutes is that every plan has the same amount, as I understand, would it not make sense to have more CPU minutes for the “bigger” plans?

    Comment by Kilojoule — May 23, 2006 #

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    It appears that a lot of people still don’t understand why you MUST oversell to remain in the webhosting business. Looking at hard drive space ALONE, a $1000 computer might come with 160GB of space, which would host less than 8 people (since you obviously need space for the OS and other software), would require a $12 a month bill to break even after a YEAR. Now, realize that servers are much more expensive than a desktop PC and that the host has to provide connections, technical support, customized programs and interfaces, backups, and even power. Without overselling, a host would probably have to only offer 500MB per person at the current price.

    I think people don’t realize that overselling is everywhere and has been for some time. If you buy a bus pass, you are able to ride the bus all day, every day. That doesn’t mean a city only sells 40 passes, since that is all that can fit on a bus at one time. No, not everyone uses the bus at the same time, so the city might sell 300+ passes. The infrequent riders make the system that much better for those who really take advantage of it.

    Ever call a business and have to wait on hold? Do you think they should employ thousands of extra people to answer the phones even though during off-peak hours they would be paying them to sit around doing nothing? No, they have to strike a balance between service and expense. Of course, some companies do this better than others.

    Comment by Ian Clifton — May 23, 2006 #

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    The reason that plans don’t come with a specific amount of CPU is that it is not a hard limit. To give you an idea: only 3% of DreamHost users use over 60 cpu minutes. The highest for yesterday was 750 cpu minutes but I have seen as high as 1250, which is the equivalent of your own very powerful dedicated server. (say a 2.8Ghz Xeon)

    Of the 3% ‘heavy’ users, 5% have been moved to servers with fewer customers to help with stability. So, one tenth of one percent of DreamHost users are on special servers due to their heavy usage, but that only means that they are moved to a machine with fewer customers while they try to optimize their site.

    One issue when it comes to cpu minutes is balancing. Whether that be via a distributed “super” computer or a simpler moving of customers between individual machines is just a matter of time and technology cost.

    Another issue is that of waste. Any popular website immediately faces the prospect of optimization. First you get your idea out there as quickly as possible. Then once you have traffic: you begin profiling the busier parts of your website, you turn on caching, and implement security features to prevent abuse. You do these even (or perhaps especially) if you have a dedicated server, since you see the direct cost of the wasted cpu cycles if it means having to upgrade or add additional servers.

    When you purchase hosting from DreamHost there is no catch. Everything provided by your plan is there when you go to use it. We continue to grow the support team as we grow. The support tech to customer ratio has actually increased within the last year.

    Providing an industry leading amount of resources at great prices, while implementing customer suggestions and minimizing growing pains (as the size of the system grows at an exceptional pace) is of course an enormous task. Yet our success to date only drives us to do better. I am somewhat amused by the naysayers, and will enjoy continuing to prove them wrong.

    Comment by Michael — May 23, 2006 #

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    The Server is Dual Opteron well Dunno if the server is same for all.

    Processors 2
    Model Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 175
    CPU Speed 2.19 GHz
    Cache Size 1024 KB
    System Bogomips 8755.6
    PCI Devices
    - (2x) Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5704 Gigabit Ethernet
    - (4x) Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
    - Host bridge: ServerWorks: Unknown device 0205
    - IDE interface: ServerWorks: Unknown device 0214
    - ISA bridge: ServerWorks: Unknown device 0234
    - PCI bridge: ServerWorks: Unknown device 0036
    - PCI bridge: ServerWorks: Unknown device 0104
    - RAID bus controller: ServerWorks: Unknown device 024a
    - (3x) USB Controller: ServerWorks: Unknown device 0223
    - VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL
    IDE Devices
    - hdb: MATSHITADVD-ROM SR-8178
    SCSI Devices
    - ATA ST3808110AS (Direct-Access)

    For now I’m happy w/ the service.
    I’m planning upgrade my site for next year.

    >> Of course, we do actually do have people who use their full 20GB.
    like me :p

    Comment by Jojo — May 24, 2006 #

33. 33

    I develop and manage keithboykin.com for its namesake. I’ve been with Dreamhost for about 4 years and has recommended it to lots of people, Keith being one of the first. Personally, I’ve never had any significant technical support issues with Dreamhost. However, just after I upgraded Keith’s site to Movable Type 3.2 about a month ago, Dreamhost started pulling the plug based on this ‘CPU usage’ issue.

    Trying to get adequate technical support from Dreamhost when you need it is like pulling teeth. And that fake-ass “Thanks!” at the end of every insincere, insignificant, unhelpful message only throws gasoline on an already raging fire. Not once has anyone from Dreamhost’s support staff explained exactly how CPU usage relates to our problem. We’ve had reps recommend hosting files on another server - which makes no sense when you’re not even using 1% of the disk space already allotted. We’ve had reps refer us to the Dreamhost Wiki and it’s outdated info on Movable Type. No one has been able to pinpoint the problem because the real problem (comment spammers attempting to access scripts) exists regardless of the actual scripts. With technical support this inadequate, I don’t know how they expect an upsale to a dedicated server to go over well. If you can’t provide adequate customer support at a lower tier of service, you haven’t given much of a reason to believe you can deliver anything indicative of a higher tier of service.

    The last time Dreamhost disabled mt-comments.cgi, I check the resource logs. Many times the culprit happened to be php5.cgi, which most of the time uses more CPU minutes than mt-comments.cgi. I used Dreamhost’s web panel to the domain to the latest versions of MySQL and PHP, but of course that hasn’t been cited as a potential problem.

    All and all, a REALLY disappointing experience …

    Comment by Donald Andrew Agarrat — May 24, 2006 #

34. 34

    There’s no rule of webhosting that says “you have to oversell” in order to stay in business. There is no sell-what-you-gots-police won’t show up and shut you down for dishonestly honest practices.

    The only time overselling is a requirement s when a company plans to offer 1TB of bandwidth and 20GB of storage for $10/month and doesn’t plan to do so losing money. There’s no reason a hosting company can’t offer smaller packages (say 75 MB of storage and 3GB/month of traffic for $2/month) or offer the same huge packages at significantly higher prices ($200/month) — in fact many do.

    If a customer doesn’t like the idea of overselling—and many don’t for any number of reasons—there are plenty of places willing to take their money. Customers just have to chose between fewer guaranteed resources at the same price, or the same resources at much higher prices if they really dislike overselling.

    PS: where’s the preview comment?

    Comment by Colin Stein — May 24, 2006 #

35. 35

    Returning to redwatch issue - it’s nothing to do with the first amendment or agreeing or disagreeing witch site’s owner. This site publishes names, addresses and pictures of people hunted down by Nazi paramilitary organization. So far one person has been severely wounded and another stabbed with knife is fighting for his life in hospital. It’s perfectly OK for me to host sites which contain information I don’t agree with, but that’s ENTIRELY different matter.

    Comment by Kimi — May 24, 2006 #

36. 36

    Hey, it’s great to see you guys offering such detailed information to your clients… makes me feel good to know there are humans behind the machines ;)

    I’m one of those few people who has had my account taken offline due to CPU overages, and while I WAS able to get it under control, I have no real idea of what it was that fixed the problem.

    My question: is there a way for me to monitor my account’s CPU usage? If so I could make changes to my web sites that would make be a better consumer, and I could actually tell when the changes make a real difference to the CPU usage.

    Without it (and I’m sure others feel this way) I’m kinda’ shooting in the dark.

    Comment by Cary — May 24, 2006 #

37. 37

    I liked the explanation of why dreamhosts oversells but the example about selling too many airplane tickets is awful. I HATE when they do that and I don’t care what they offer me, I need to be somewhere. Maybe people who have no life and no work aren’t bothered by missing a flight but than again, thats not me.

    Anyway I hope you guys sort out that business with the BBB, even if its as simple as giving them a call and explaining your side.

    Comment by Anonymous — May 24, 2006 #

38. 38

    I am a longstanding Dreamhost customer as well as a customer of Textdrive, Site5, Hostopia, and Rackspace. I can say right off the bat that CPU limits are essential to quality shared hosting. I understand the frustration of not understanding why your site is taking so much CPU or how to fix it, but honestly, in a shared hosting environment, that is YOUR problem. If you don’t like that then you should move to a host that doesn’t enforce CPU limits. I can tell you from experience that such a host is likely to have intractable performance problems (if not downright outtages) that are never resolved day after day, month after month.

    I have been looking for the ideal solution to high-available web hosting and my conclusion is that to ensure quality you need not only top-tier redundant data centers, but you also need the talent to profile and optimize all the code running on your server. There’s simply no magic bullet, and for $8 a month you can’t expect Dreamhost to fix your code problems for you. It’s just an economic impossibility.

    My impression having used many shared web hosts is that Dreamhost has both the chops and the experience to provide increasingly reliable shared hosting. The changes they’ve made over the past 2-3 years have bolstered performance and reliability, and if there’s a performance problem I believe they have the tools to track it down. A lot of hosts have great staff who know what they’re doing (textdrive and site5 for example), but they don’t yet have the experience Dreamhost has, neither have they put the hours into their systems Dreamhost has. CPU limits, separate MySQL servers (now dedicated to specific accounts!), and the ability to easily move accounts around are critical features that are surprisingly missing from many shared hosts.

    That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. There always is. Support response times aren’t what they used to be, for instance. But overall with all the myriad pros and cons to juggle between different hosts, Dreamhost continues to be my best value proposition in most cases.

    Comment by Gabe — May 24, 2006 #

39. 39

    Cary,

    There’s some great informaiton in the wiki about how to monitor your CPU usage. http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Special:Search?search=cpu&go=Go

    Great post guys! Just keeping throwing more Hard drives into the pool!

    –Matttail

    Comment by Matt — May 24, 2006 #

40. 40

    See, I don’t have peace of mind because I’m convinced that horse is right about to bite that kid’s face off.

    By the way, what is “Snakes On A Plane”?

    Comment by Small Paul — May 25, 2006 #

41. 41

    What Allen Iverson got to do with overselling?

    Comment by Eric — May 26, 2006 #

42. 42

    [...] Update: How novel, I’m only chatting a little shit! You should read this and this. You can read my post if you like, but those two are a lot better. [...]

    Pingback by ThisDomainWasFree Weblog » Blog Archive » An Honest Dreamhost Review — May 26, 2006 #

43. 43

    The alt tag on the Allen Iverson image says “I’m THE TRUTH like AI.” Our pictures never make sense, go read our back issues and you’ll figure that out pretty quickly.

    Comment by Pete — May 26, 2006 #

44. 44

    I have two gallery sites and a music site hosted w/ DH, and I’ve been very happy since moving my music site over here about two years ago. My old host freaked out about bandwidth or CPU usage, and instead of helping me figure out the problem, they just shut my site down. I’ve had very few problems with DH, they’ve always been helpful, and I definitely recommend them to friends.

    So thanks for always keeping customers informed and responding so quickly to tickets, etc. You’re also sometimes funny. ;-)

    Comment by Dana — May 31, 2006 #

45. 45

    [...] http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/ [...]

    Pingback by blacktulip.cn » Blog Archive » Dreamhost虚拟主机取消CPU限制 — May 31, 2006 #

46. 46

    I have been using dreamhost for just over 6 months, and it has been the best and worst hosting experience I have had all at once. I believe that overselling allows for deals that are ‘too good to be true’. The amount of people using the servers and the resources jump suddenly, and the company is not able to handle it.

    I have experienced more downtime, and especially email downtime, with dreamhost than any other company. I have lost clients due to these downtimes. I have sinced moved all of my paying clients off of dreamhost and will not be transferring any new ones over.

    I will keep my dreamhost account anyway, and use it for personal projects and accounts that I host for free and that do not depend on high uptime. I appreciate the up to date features dreamhost offers and the cutting edge technology that they are quick to implement. I have also had good experiences with tech support even though some serverwide problems were very slow to be fixed.

    It would be nice if someday dreamhost could prove reliable enough so that I could actually use it for business. I would happily pay the same money for less disk space and bandwidth in exchange for reliable service.

    Comment by Lori — May 31, 2006 #

47. 47

    I’ve been a customer for almost 2 years and will be renewing cause I’m happy with the service. I’m glad that the CPU minutes thing is being dropped although that is not a concern for me because I make sure I don’t use much. I’m also glad that the Dreamhost operators are making sure another customer doesn’t kill my sites because they don’t know what they are doing and peg the cpu’s.

    Comment by Dave Reid — May 31, 2006 #

48. 48

    What Josh neglects to mention is the impact of Dreamhost Rewards on their model. If you refer a customer to them who buys a $7.95 a month plan for 1 year, they pay you $97 commission. You can keep the whole thing, or port some (or all) of it into a discount code. And if someone you referred refers someone (getting a $97 commission themselves), you get $5.

    But then you also have the cost of the free domain registration and credit card processing fees which could add up to around another $5.

    While this obviously doesn’t happen on every account, on some the numbers for a YEAR of web hosting could look like this.

    $119.40 billed
    -$102.00 paid in commissions
    -$005.00 domain registration and merchant fees
    ============
    $12.40 to pay for servers, bandwidth, support for a year

    Now how do they make money on that?

    Comment by Greg — May 31, 2006 #

49. 49

    Outside of the email problems of the last week, my experience with Dreamhost in general has been EXCELLENT. I’m quite happy with the bandwidth and features. I’ve hosted over 10 sites with Dreamhost. Great uptime, too.

    It’s like you’re talking about somebody else.

    Anyway, I love the idea of an ISP that is driven by personalites that seem to be incredibly enthusiastic about their business - and not stockholder driven.

    As they write their own PERL code for all control panel (and I assume bookeeping) duties, they are able to integrate all the functions in such a way to meet a wide range of client situations.

    Also I feel like although it may be risky sometimes, the Dreamhost guys are out there looking for leading edge features and installs to offer..and stay up on safe and proven upgrades to hardware and software. I like that!

    So hats off to Dreamhost! you guys rock
    stephen barncard
    http://crosbycpr.com, http://crosbystillsnash.com, http://crosbynash.com

    Comment by stephen barncard — May 31, 2006 #

50. 50

    I must stand by DreamHost on this.
    I am one of those people that uses the full 20Gb and the full TB (and then some), and guess what? I paid them for it too! http://misc.chiisana.net/dh_bill.png

    Comment by Andy Huang — May 31, 2006 #

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