Topic awaiting preservation: <--DreamHost ... Me-->

OK, I realize the title looks like an HTML tag, but those are supposed to be arrows. "DreamHost this way, me that way." It's an illustration. Anyway ...

I've been trying lately to set up an installation of Gallery2 and a blog using WordPress, with another Gallery2 installation merged with the blog for its own purposes. But all three have become increasingly slow on DreamHost. Today, things were almost unresponsive.

I recall reading about issues with MySQL at DreamHost before and it's becoming evident to me that they do indeed exist, as I've found no other reasons that any one of the above should be as slow as it is. So I'm giving serious thought to moving somewhere else. I have no other qualms with DreamHost, and I seriously dread having to move things, but the future of my site (and income) relies on a speedy Gallery.

After finding this rant while searching for DreamHost speed issues, I've begun to consider Hosting Zoom. Before I make a decision, however, I'd like to know what others' experiences have been like (both with DreamHost and, possibly, Hosting Zoom) and if anyone can recommend someone else who offers about what DreamHost does for about the same price (or cheaper).

Edit: Also now looking at Site5.



(Edited by Wes on 12-21-2005 04:06)

First what I know and suspect with Dreamhost. Their main concern is power, I believe they're feverishly trying to sort out a lack of available power in their building. Months ago I was having a dialog with a sysadmin and sales making sure an upcoming project was going to work out using their dedicated services, we got it all spec'd and ready and I asked them to get 2 machines started and they said they could not, all of a sudden after talking about this for weeks, roll out any dedicated servers "until the end of the year".

That coupled with some unoffical information I received from an old DH hand about the building's power capacity being upgraded (no, nothing to do with the backup generator/outage situation, they've put in a new genertor for that) I drew the conclusion (my own guess) that they simply cannot rollout new SQL servers at the moment. I don't think they've gone lax in taking care of their customers but simply may not be able to at the moment. Hypothesis entirely but it may be something worth asking support if you're interested in staying, it is fast approaching "the end of the year". I saw that rant a few weeks ago along with their unanswered BBB report card, that's left me quite trembly, that and all their recent promotions and user surges. Anyhoo, all the fwiw.

If stability is what you're after you might look at http://www.hostway.com/ and Hosting Zoom... both are doing well according to netcraft but their reports don't necissarily tell you anything about how overworked their SQL servers are.

Cost of power and easy to install open source apps and their subsequent resource consumption are very interesting new problems for the shared hosting industry up and coming. I'm not confident that you can escape these types of problems sticking with shared hosting anywhere. Would suck to move then have performance start sucking at the new place as well!

If you haven't done so already at Dreamhost, you might try creating a new database and seeing if you get any better performance out of that, no telling which DB server you'll end up on when creating a new one, you might get lucky and get on a less inhabited machine. I'm running a lot of MySQL dependant sites at Dreamhst and none are having issues. Gallery can be a beast as well fyi.

Might look into http://www.jaguarpc.com/ . Been there a few years and have had Zero problems with an admittedly low traffic site. They`re really helpful, tho, so ask em. :-)




<edit>They have a 5000 MB storage/75GB bandwidth deal going right now for $7.95/mo.</edit>

(Edited by docilebob on 12-21-2005 07:43)

^^ Another vote for them http://www.jaguarpc.com folks. I'm not a heavy user, but I didn't have any trouble with them I didn't cause myself. Their help service is pretty fast, too.

I was with Jaguar, well Aletia when they were being bought by Jaguar and was having absolutely terrible downtime issues. I discussed this with Bob and seems the minute I left them to run back to Dreamhost (it was just one test domain, trying to play the field a little) they got perfect again So yeah, Bob's beenm there a while and if they're still good they're still good! Hostrocket was another I tried that I would put on a par with aletia/jaguar/dreamhost/shared, performance has always been fine there but their admin toolset is a bit of a hodge podge nightmare

48 hours. 48 hours it took to get a support reply. And all I got was ...

quote:

---

While browsing your sites it appears that the only long delay is the
initial loading of the gallery and blog. After this it loads quickly
(within a couple seconds). This initial startup delay is common, and can
be lessened by removing unneeded modules so gallery is loading less
files. The more individual files loaded the longer it takes to come up,
and gallery uses a lot of individual files.


Unfortunately this initial delay is extremely hard to avoid in our
hosting environment.

---

I could explain how there was never any delay a few weeks ago, how I have only essential modules installed, how there are still long delays in trying to save Wordpress changes that have nothing to do with Gallery, and how Gallery on many, many other Web sites does not have an initial delay of 15+ seconds, but I can't wait another 48 hours for another lame excuse.

But, hey, they did send me a $10 gift certificate yesterday for being with them for 5 years.

Nope, I think I'm done screwing around with DreamHost. Support has become a joke.

I'm still looking around for a good host, but it's getting hard to find someone that offers what I need. The way most of them handle "add-on" domains is a turn-off. (For example, if wesleytreat.com is my "primary" domain, then bigwaste.com and texastwisted.com would point to subdirectories in my wesleytreat.com directory structure. Feh.) Reseller Zoom (as opposed to Hosting Zoom) offers fully separate sites/domains, but even by their own admission, the RZ machines aren't as robust as the HZ machines.

That, however, isn't as important as a fast MySQL server. Anyone else have any experience with a particular host with good service and knows that their MySQL is reliable and fast?

Well I have to renew my hosting in a week and I was thinking of going for another 2 years at DH but now I'm not so sure....

Its not helped by the fact that the FTP connection is being actively refused at the moment

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org | Revenant: The Zombie Magazine | Wonders | Justice for Pat Richard | FAQs: Emperor | Site Reviews | Reception Room

if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

And how nice of them to prove my point for me this morning ...



Incidentally, I replied to their pathetic support e-mail with a very strongly worded opinion on their quality of service recently. I'm extremely curious to see how much they consider a five-year customer worth holding onto.



(Edited by Wes on 12-23-2005 19:20)

monitoring thread with much interest thanks Wes, and hope it turns out rosey

quote:

---

Wes said:

Incidentally, I replied to their pathetic support e-mail with a very
strongly worded opinion on their quality of service recently. I'm
extremely curious to see how much they consider a five-year customer
worth holding onto.

---

Ten dollar!!

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org | Revenant: The Zombie Magazine | Wonders | Justice for Pat Richard | FAQs: Emperor | Site Reviews | Reception Room

if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

quote:

---

I have to renew my hosting in a week

---

Don't forget that fellow Asylum members also offer hosting. Like me. http://www.thesecretlabs.com/hosting/ Nice thing about dealing with a person, rather than a company, is that I have complete autonomy in setting up a plan that fits, in case one of the packages doesn't.

I realized I hadn't given an update on this.

Shortly after my complaint, things started speeding up again. And although it took 3 1/2 days, I finally got this reply:

quote:

---

I understand your position. We've had a lot of customers lately that are
using more than their fair share of system resources, particularly when
it comes to dynamically generated content such as wordpress or gallery.
Things have slowed down, although not usually to the point you're
describing. We're working all the time to try to balance our server
loads and we go around correcting bad users on a regular basis.

At this moment, there's nothing much to do but wait as we work on things.
We understand if this means we lose you -- we don't want to lose any
customers, but due to circumstances beyond our control, we have been
unable to create additional servers to offload and load balance with and
we're running out of breathing room. It's probably going to be another
month or two before it's going to get better, but we're working on it.

Tech support has been going up quite rapidly, as well, and we're hiring a
lot of new people (although we're still a little green.) We're doing our
best to work through the holiday loads.

---

Performance has been pretty good since then, thought sometimes just a little slow, but if things continue to be acceptable, I think I'll wait it out see what happens rather than go through the stress of moving everything.

That really fortifies my suspicions about their power problem. They really should pull their heads out of their butts and quit running promos so cheap that every bonehead on the block signs up. At least don't provide said boneheads with copious amounts of "one-click" installs, all of which use MySQL/PHP. Seems common sense to me, they were having (or were at least aware of) these problems before they ran the last promotion...

I'll continue to give them the benefit of the doubt however due to the overall experience over the last 5 years (not to mention the hassle of moving). Surely their plans had to go forward and couldn't be helped right? They've always been not-evil.

Media Temple is in the same building, I might look around for commentaries on them as well to keep with the tempreature taking

quote:

---

JKMabry said:
They really should pull their heads out of their butts and quit running promos so cheap that every bonehead on the block signs up.

---

I'm not a bonehead, at least i dont think i am ??

No Sig ?

JKMabry, according to Bob Pankala who ran www.teamphotoshop.com up to last year when he sold it, plus www.pankpages.com and http://www.extremepixels.com/ Media Temple has been great for years.

I have no personal opinion, but i trust Bob
/D

{cell 260} {Blog}
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