LooseSuits

Yeah man, that is some great advise!

You are absolutely right ...but they could of paid $10 to another (more quality provider) and wouldn't of had problems. I don't think they use even 3% of their allocation on dreamhost :)

That is one way to look at it. Every time there are issues (and those issues add up) go do something else.

Meanwhile, readers are frustrated because they bump into the same problems over and over again. When DH goes down, a large amount of our member blogs go down. Then I get emails wondering why members are so cheap or care so little about their readers they can't get quality hosting. If I were an advertiser the host would definitely be a deciding factor on a blog I paid money to see my ads.

There are many considerations to think about when picking a host. Occasional downtime is expected but when it gets too frequent it is a lot to ask readers to be patient for.

Your hosting company, and their pricing should be directly proportional to how critical site accessibility is to you.

If you don't ever want downtime, and that's actually important to you, then you're going to have to pay for it.

If you're paying $10 a month for tons of bandwidth and ease of use, you can't really expect flawless service. Is it possible? Absolutely! Is it likely? Not at all!

I run my own server, with about 40 sites on it. A couple of the sites are critical. For those sites I have a separate server for redundancy. If one of my servers crashes and burns, or the backbone to them does, then I can have the traffic diverted to the other one in a matter of minutes. This costs me about $200 a month, and some time invested on the intial set up by myself.

I've had Dreamhost for a little over a year now, and even with the occasional downtime, it's a pretty good service for what I'm paying. When I do have a loss of service, it doesn't last anywhere near as long as my Comcast outages, and I'm paying 6 or 7 times as much for Comcast!

Ozone42 is right: if you want 99.9999999999% uptime, you have to be willing pay for it. Otherwise, it really isn't all that critical.

My dreamhost account used to be down every other day, all my hosted sites would be out, but now a day they improved the uptime by alo, i never complained and i still don't, i just don't recommend it to certain people so they don't hate me after a while.

When downtime becomes too frequent - switch hosts.
The ones that say dreamhost is a good host had never paid 10$ to a real provider :)
They are not very bad, but they aren't good either.

A bit more of a note. My primary server is through serverbeach. In three years it has been down a total of two hours, because of a massive power outage in the area. Interesting fact, the power outage didn't cause the downtime (they have backup generators,) but it was summer and the room started to overheat! They shut things down to prevent permanent damage.

Hosting: Somehow I have a hard time believing you are being completely honest and impartial. Just a hunch though.

As far as I'm concerned, DreamHost is as good as service as you'll get with shared hosts. If you want more reliability (realize this was three hours of downtime in about the past 8 months... or, around 44 cents worth of your plan's downtime), you should consider dedicated virtual or dedicated.

But yeah, people need to chillax about hosting downtimes. The most vocal people are usually the ones it doesn't affect. Those of us with bigger sites realize that a couple hours of downtime a year isn't going to kill us. Not worth having a heart attack over.

Kyle, I agree with Hosting. I personally think dreamhost is crap, but wasn't going to bring it up, as it's a bit off topic. Now that someone's broken the ice for me I know lots people who get slow connectivity to no connectivity using them, and it happens regularly.

You can get better service, throughput, and uptime through any number of people. I sell hosting, as I imagine Hosting does. I'm not going to say people should switch to me, but I know my clients are happy and have better results than the people that use dreamhost.

Convenient the people bashing DH all own hosting companies.

Just sayin'....

I sell hosting only in my country (9rules is not my niche) and I'm not really bashing them, I have an account with them and many others ...and "many others" are way much better. It looked like a 3 hour downtime to you in months ... it looks like weekly downtime to me and very poor performance for php and mysql sites.
I speak from experience and not from what I hear from others, you can get a better value for your money with other providers! and this is final :)

Thank you for your answers. I didn't expect I'd have so many of them :)

Now, on dreamhost blog Josh wrote "Super Lame Apology". There is one argument already mentioned above: even if they would refund whole month price - $10 - what is it? Downtime is bad, but for $10/month you just can't demand (although you can still hope on) 99,9% uptime.

I just don't think about my blog as a "critical webpage" and I'm very happy with that :)

Dreamhost was my 5th host I think... I bailed on each one because of a lack of timely support and too much downtime. I've learned that they're all like that though.

Sure, DH has some downtime, but to be honest, I don't earn enough from my online activity to justify spending more money on a "quality" host. The quality of DH is just fine for most of us I think, and we're just going to have to deal with the occasional downtime.

For the dreamhost users: how much space and bandwidth are you using?:)

I'm using about 70gigs of HD space (yeah I do lots of backups to it!) and probably 60-80gigs of bandwidth a month.

Nowhere near how much they offer me, but considering I've been paying $2 per month this year, I think I've got my money's worth out of it!!

I tend to agree that if you are paying such a small amount for hosting then you can't expect 99.99% uptime. It's interesting to read people's comments though as I'm working on a blog post comparing the US and UK hosting markets.

I am quite satisfied with DH. And, I am satisfied with the the minor percentage of down time.

Kyle: I agree with everything you have stated to Hosting.

rickcurran - give me a buzz when you finish writing that stuff
LorriM and Kyle - I don't own a hosting company, I just resell hosting just in my city and nearby area.

P.S: some of you don't see I try to help you :|

I own the internets

God, a good host is a hard thing to find, because there are so many aspects to what makes a good host, and finding all of them is the hardest thing.

As a Web designer I often am asked to recommend a host and I just can't...I've been through four myself in the past few years and none has been exemplary - all have downtime, most have lousy support - because it's such a cheap market these days.

If you can afford to pay $99 for a dedicated server you might have better luck, but even then....