Alright, so there's been quite a bit of bad things said about Dreamhost in the past, and some questionable practices that they do.

Many former customers of theirs will tell you that they stink, but I have also come across a few people who have been completely satisfied with them.

The price points for example are very attractive and depending on the type of site you have, it can work out pretty well.

There is this one friend of mine who's been with them for about 6 or 7 years now and he's been entirely satisfied.

Has anyone here used Dreamhost before, and what have your experiences been?

Dreamhost is a large host in the market however they did have a recent billing issue which was VERY unfortunate. They basically billed every single customer by accident totaling 7.5 million dollars.

You can read the blog post here:

http://blog.dreamhosters.com/2008/01...omers-7500000/

This was big talk in the hosting industry and many people switched. This has nothing to do with their performance but their response to the billing issue did not sit well with all the customers.

Best idea is to read hosting reviews and get a good feel about what their own customer base says.

good luck!

I think you are always going to find people for and against a host. They made a mistake, but I imagine thats not going to happen again. One must wonder though why they were so careless as to not doublecheck a manual billing imput before hitting "save" and causing such issues.

I agree. It was stupid. And then to blame the programers?

I agree that every host has it's fans and detractors, but Dreamhost especially seems to have attracted a lot of negative publicity for the billing issue and other reasons.

Another friend of mine has had some downtime issues with Dreamhost, and their response to his problems were not always as quick as what might be desired.

Personally, I remain pretty neutral about them.

Sorry I had to resort to this.

My sites with Dreamhost are down now for the past 10 hours.

No response from their tech support.

I'm on their PS and pay a total of $56.00 p/month and still keep seeing downtime.

Here's my thread on WebHosting Talk

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=661302

I mean I'm pissed cause I got 2 forums, a webmaster forum and a new web hosting forum.

The webmaster forum did over 1 Million queries and 2.2Gigs of bandwith last month.


This is what i get on my screen right now

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.directoryjunction.com/forums/?

The following error was encountered:

* Connection to 208.113.249.228 Failed

The system returned:

(111) Connection refused

The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.

Your cache administrator is webmaster.

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.hostinggossip.com/

The following error was encountered:

* Connection to 208.113.249.228 Failed

The system returned:

(111) Connection refused

The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.

Your cache administrator is webmaster.


I mean a response from them would of been nice, considering I've been a customer of theirs for almost 3 years even after numerous outages.

I don't know, but I don't feel too happy right now.

Hi Adnan! Did you give any reply from Dreamhost.com support? Can you post an update on your issue?

I think the only issues I have seen with Dreamhost besides the billing issue and lack of true customer service (either in a timely manner or the attitude of the rep telling the customer it is their own fault) is the whole issue a couple of months back with a huge hack that went down. How can you not say anything to your customers and instead let them read about it online?

adnan, you have my sympathy! Dreamhost is one company that I've never used myself but through researching different ones in the past, I honestly didn't form a good opinion of them at all.

I hope it all gets sorted out very soon for you, adnan. There's nothing more frustrating than downtime. Please do keep us posted on how it's going.

Digressing a little into the invoicing mess -

I was reading last week about a girl who'd contacted her credit card company to reverse the charges after reading about the whole billing debacle, only to find out it was a charge that really was due. They'd messed up the dates on it so she didn't realize it was genuine. Dreamhost then got in touch and charged her a fee of $25 for doing the chargeback.

Though some might disagree, I don't think you can blame the girl though for doing so - the whole situation was such a mess, no wonder there was confusion (though most of us would have an admittedly better idea when our renewal date was, I imagine).

Any company that messed up payments/billing would never get a second chance from me, I'm afraid.

Dreamhost also had a major problem last night when they inadvertantly blocked ALL access to their servers due to a mistake in updating their router - see http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/...irewall-error/ for details.

I've had some personal sites with Dreamhost for a while now, and for the price it's probably not bad, but it's not something I would trust for any serious business. They seem to have grown quite quickly and don't have either the people or the process in place to properly manage what is now a pretty big operation. It's too bad, as I was pretty impressed with their control panel and other infrastructure when I first signed up.

well i have been with dream host for a while now and have found them to be ok i have had no probs with them other than the billing (1 off), and with that they sent out emails saying what went wrong and that were sorry.
server down time has been next to none at all so i guess i have been lucky, after all we all make stuffups dont we it is in our nature.

Dream host is a well known host, but they seems to be getting some poor reviews of late. But you need not worry about the router issue or overcharging. These happen once in a while and the fact is DH is open about it while other would have tried to deny/hide it.

Like I had said earlier, a persons satisfaction with Dream host will also depend on what kind of site they are operating with them. For any non-business type site, I am sure they are quite acceptable for what you are paying and everything.

Despite their problems, I think there are far worse hosts than Dreamhost.

dreamhost is not the best, but a very reliable hosting provider.

i still tend to use hostgator

I am not a big fan of dreamhost. They are okay if you just have one site, not so great if you want to resell.