DreamHost Downtime
My wife and I have two DreamHost accounts that we’re closing because of miserable downtime and no uptime guarantees.
I’m guessing DreamHost’s downtime issues are due to gross overselling of their servers. I’m certainly not against overselling within reason, but the hosting specs they offer are simply outrageous: 50 GB Storage and 5 TB bandwidth on a shared hosting account just to start.
It’s a heck of a deal for the money, but not worth the downtime for any site that’s important.
Over the last year, one account had:
45 outages totaling 15h 9m 56s of downtime, which amounts to 99.82% uptime
And our other account had a whopping:
115 outages totaling 1d 23h 15m 16s of downtime, amounting to 99.43% uptime.
I contacted DreamHost about the outages and they offered to move us to different servers and confirmed:
“unfortunately you’re right in that we don’t make any uptime guarantees”
(insert shameless plug)
I’m proud to say that at IvyCat hosting servers have had an average uptime of 99.998% in the same time frame.
Sure, you don’t get near as much storage or bandwidth, but you get solid, reliable, personalized hosting, backed by an uptime guarantee. That’s important to me and my customers.
July 18th, 2008 at 11:41
I’ve used Surpass Hosting (http://surpasshosting.com) for the past 3.5 years and they’ve been superb. They have a wonderful help staff and I’ve only had unexpected downtime once. Every other case of downtime, they sent out an email beforehand.
July 18th, 2008 at 11:46
That’s great. There are plenty of great hosts out there.
As the lead tech and developer for ivyCat, all of my sites have been on IvyCat hosting for five or six years.
I’m obviously a bit biased. 🙂
July 20th, 2008 at 13:46
IMHO, most websites do not need mega storage and bandwidth.
So why pay for more simply because it looks like promised “good deal”.