Not Happy with Dreamhost
Monday, March 2nd, 2009After being a satisfied Dreamhost customer for almost 4 years, I’ve cancelled my account. I’ve moved my hosting over to GoDaddy and I find the whole experience very frustrating. While there’s nothing wrong with GoDaddy’s hosting, they don’t offer all the features that Dreamhost does. Frankly nobody does. Which is why I stayed with Dreamhost even though their availability has suffered through periods of flakiness.
Unfortunately, I had to pull the plug last week. There was apparently a problem with the file server that my account was hosted on, so they moved my shell account to another system. Not sure that I really follow that logic, but whatever works for them. Unfortunately, they never actually copied any of my content.
I opened 2 or 3 support requests last week and none were answered. I followed the status updates on dreamhoststatus.com but they kept saying all problems were resolved. Obviously mine was not. So I finally pulled the pin and moved everything over to GoDaddy. Amusingly, after I did that I sent one more email asking if Dreamhost planned to ever address my support requests. I received a reply back stating that everything looked good from their end. Of course, what they were seeing was my domains hosted somewhere else. I again checked my shell account and…nothing there.
I’m really frustrated because some of the features I have been using on Dreamhost are just not available elsewhere. Subversion support. Using the auth_mysql Apache module. And others. Yet, what value are all those features if I can’t have the site up?
I don’t mind a little down time with budget hosting, but I don’t like being told that everything is up and operational and then having my support requests actively ignored. So I’ve had to move.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the missing functionality. It may be that the GoDaddy move is an interm step before going to a dedicated server. But I really don’t want to spend the money on that right now. So I’ll stay in a holding pattern and see how GoDaddy works for me.
