23 Responses to “Speaking of scheming…”

1. Mike Says:
   December 10th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

   I was going to put up a sucks-site that whined about how much all other sucks-sites suck, but I lost interest and the domain expired. ;-)

2. John Knowles Says:
   December 11th, 2008 at 1:18 am

   GoDaddy has long been known as one of the bad webhost/domain registration companies within the web community. This news really doesn’t surprise me.

   The domain name game is one of the dirtiest out there every domain that you can think of now days is squatted by either a company or lone individual that is hoping to get rich quick with every variation of playstation and xbox name they can think of/afford.

   At least our happy host isn’t up to dirty tricks like this :)

3. BUGabundo Says:
   December 11th, 2008 at 4:43 am

   i guess most of us know about GD bad business, but was REALLY necessary for a DH employee to come to this point?

   Are u trying to steal clients from GD? damn if that is the idea, you better just offer new domain campaigns and a few free SSL certs and you are better of…

   :-[

4. huitzl Says:
   December 11th, 2008 at 7:11 am

   Positive example of a gripe site: http://dearadobe.com
   And apparently Adobe is paying attention to it. Would be even nicer if Adobe had some kind of bugtracker where you can see what becomes of your issue.
   And so should Dreamhost. A “suggestions” list is not a bugtracker.

5. Rex Says:
   December 11th, 2008 at 2:29 pm

   @huizl: “A suggestions list is not a bugtracker”

   What he said! … In spades.

6. Mike Says:
   December 12th, 2008 at 5:58 pm

   Oh good, no post is complete without a spamming scumbag.

7. John Knowles Says:
   December 13th, 2008 at 10:40 am

   @Natalie Dailey

   Isn’t godaddy investing enough in advertising as it is without paying people to spam competitors blogs! I hope diggnation eventually see godaddy for the spamming, scheming “company” it is and refuse to have the as a sponsor.

8. Jason Cosper Says:
   December 13th, 2008 at 3:54 pm

   Looks like that “Natalie Dailey” comment slipped thru the spam filter. No worries, I’ve gone and fixed that now… ;)

9. Online lint filter Says:
   December 14th, 2008 at 12:39 pm

   Ah no! I added 5 years renewal to my domain names on GoDaddy. Who would you recommend for domain names, apart from GoDaddy? Also, do the renewal times get transferred generally?

10. ex-subscriber Says:
    December 14th, 2008 at 11:29 pm

    The sheer arrogance of this post typifies the whole mantra behind DreamHost; you have one of the worst service records, yet you strut around like you’re totally awesome. You have absolutely no qualms about ripping naive users off, repeatedly telling them what a good service they’re getting for the price, and that these constant failures are industry norms. You have absolutely no business ethics whatsoever, and when this finally comes back to kick you in the ass, I bet you’ll be completely surprised and then complain about it and call everyone imbeciles.

    You really DO suck, DreamHost.

    Now watch as your brainwashed flunkies insult me in their throes of denial.

11. Jeff Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 1:53 am

    > you have one of the worst service records

    You base this statement on… what evidence?

    - Jeff

12. John Knowles Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 9:59 am

    @ex-subscriber

    I am a web developer and have been for the past 5-7 years I have been with dreamhost for 2 years.

    I am VERY happy with the dreamhost service the support is second to none (I sent a support request last night and had a reply within 30-45min and a 2nd reply based on my response within a hour of my first response).

    There have been other servers/clusters that have had issues in the past but the server/cluster I am on has been relatively problem free. There have been the occasional outage of a hour here or there over the 2 years but never anything thats a problem.

    DOWNTIME is a guarantee on ANY hosting even if you have clusters of load balanced servers across multiple data centers. EVEN GOOGLE has downtime and there not on a $9 a month all you can eat plan.

    My only qualm is the slow ping response on the server I’m on occasionally but I am in the uk accessing data in the US.

13. Online lint filter Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 5:18 pm

    I have an expensive dedicated server with Gyron Internet (fantastic uptime, hyper-geeky reports when there is the slightest chance anything may go wrong, which never does). I have a Dreamhost account for my personal sites.

    I find Dreamhost is great for my personal sites. I get an average of 14 minutes downtime per month. This beats administering the whole server myself. I’d rather Dreamhost fix things than me.

    Don’t get me wrong, for mission hyperneutroncritical I wouldn’t recommend Dreamhost, but for everything else they do well.

    I did try MediaTemple and it was pretty terrible.

14. Mike Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 9:42 pm

    Now watch as your brainwashed flunkies insult me in their throes of denial.

    That’s how morons always end their posts. Tacking that on the end of a retarded post doesn’t make it any less retarded.

    It’s the same as saying, “I’m a complete jackass and I should expect people to point that out, but if I point out the obvious at the end of my post, I’ll trick myself into thinking I’m clever.”

    Do you think the fact that they’re one of the biggest hosts in the world might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of happy customers? Yeah, that’s ALWAYS a sign of horrible service.

15. Yoshi Says:
    December 19th, 2008 at 7:54 am

    So are you guys expecting more “Dreamhost Sucks” sites because you can’t keep Yoshi up? Just curious.

16. RighteousIndignation Says:
    December 20th, 2008 at 6:48 am

    Of course, no discussion of “suck sites” is complete without mentioning the most awesome http://fuckdreamhost.com … now *that*, my friends, is a classic “suck site”!!

17. swaffie Says:
    December 21st, 2008 at 6:36 am

    I got RickRoll’D :/

18. Michael Says:
    December 24th, 2008 at 6:40 am

    @jeff:

    GD is #16. DH doesn’t make the list.

    http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/Hosters?tn=november_2008

19. Jeff Says:
    December 27th, 2008 at 1:53 am

    > GD is #16. DH doesn’t make the list.

    From the site:

    “If you represent a hosting company and would like to be included in the table, we charge 1200 GBP per annum for inclusion. Please mail us at sales@netcraft.com if you would like to be included.”

    I’m no longer at DreamHost, but I’m pretty sure Brett (Dh Marketing Poobah) would never pay to be placed on a list like that.

    Also, it looks like they base it on the server where the company’s corporate site is located – not those servers that customers will end up on:

    “Using the performance of a hosting provider’s own site to determine the performance of the hosting companies network, is only indicative.”

    Regarding GoDaddy, I don’t doubt that their corporate sales site has stellar uptime. You spend $2.7 million dollars on a super bowl ad and beyond even that for celebrity endorsements, you make that sort of thing a priority.

    - Jeff

20. Jeff Says:
    December 27th, 2008 at 2:03 am

    …and, really, depending on where you look you can find results that will say anything.

    Here’s a site I found that says DreamHost has 99.98% uptime (again, based on the performance of the main corporate site).

    http://www.webhostingstuff.com/uptime/DreamHost.html

    Which, again, doesn’t mean much as this is just for a single corporate/sales site. In fact, that actually sounds a little high to me, but then again when I worked at DH I didn’t deal with downtime issues much (in later years, at least).

    Anyhow, I think most people are interested in their personal web and email servers, and that’s not nearly as easy to condense in a report such as this.

    My impression (having seen it from the inside) is that most people have phenomenally good service with a relative minority having hit upon some pretty bad problems. It seems that some servers/clusters have more trouble than others, really.

    While perhaps not the absolute best ever, I’d put DH up against any comparably priced shared hosting provider when it comes to reliability any day.

    Just my 2 cents, as a former DreamHost employee (who hosts stuff here and wants good uptime as well)… :)

    - Jeff

21. Michael Says:
    December 27th, 2008 at 9:25 am

    > I’m no longer at DreamHost,

    There’s a lot of that.

    > I’m pretty sure Brett (Dh Marketing Poobah) would never pay to be placed on a list like that.

    http://www.worldblu.com/scorecard/question10.php

    DH pays comparable amounts to apply to be on a lists like the most Democratic, or green. Netcraft is similar, and “indicative” of hosting performance. Yes, Brett wouldn’t want that.

22. Jeff Says:
    December 27th, 2008 at 4:40 pm

    > There’s a lot of that.

    Just to clarify, I no longer work at DreamHost. I’m a former employee (and, as with customers, our employee retention rate has always been pretty good – I was there just shy of 10 years, myself).

    > DH pays comparable amounts to apply to be on a lists like the
    > most Democratic, or green. Netcraft is similar, and
    > “indicative” of hosting performance. Yes, Brett wouldn’t
    > want that.

    So, when called to support your “worst service record” position, you point to that list as some sort of proof that it sucks. Then, when told that DreamHost didn’t pay to be on the list (and given reasons why said list is meaningless), you imply that it’s because the uptime sucks.

    Actually, the reason I say Brett wouldn’t pay to be on that particular list is because it’d be a bad return on investment: The ‘Most Democratic’ thing was interesting/unusual and resulted in some attention. The ‘Green’ thing was an outgrowth of our own internal decision to lessen our footprint any – stuff we decided to do anyhow, were proud of and figured might be of interest to customers and potential customers.

    This… This is just a boring, flawed list. Anyone who reads the fine print would realize it is meaningless for finding a good host. DreamHost doesn’t spend much on advertising (aside from the Rewards program, which has been very successful), so when it does it is going to be on something unique and interesting. That particular list wouldn’t make the cut with Brett, nor with me if I were in his shoes.

    The upshot is that this doesn’t support your original assertion at all.

    Checking for returned GET requests to corporate sites isn’t demonstrable of anything – unless you honestly think an advertising-centric company like GoDaddy is going to give your site anywhere near as much TLC as their own. Checking any single site isn’t going to provide any sort of meaningful statistic of use to potential customers, let alone their main corporate presence.

    Anyhow, if you have anything else halfway solid to base the “worst service records” assertion on, I’d be interested in seeing it.

    - Jeff

23. Mark Says:
    January 4th, 2009 at 7:08 pm

    I wouldn’t waste my time and money creating a web site to bash a company. I might just go on a few blogs and post to get the word out, but that’s about it.