I Dream of Hosting
Written: Feb 19 '01 (Updated Apr 18 '01)
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Pros: Good hosting plans; economical prices; great online control panel!
Cons: No telephone support.
The Bottom Line: A great hosting provider!
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| dtobias's Full Review: Dreamhost |
After my experiences with 5 Bucks a Month as the web host for my personal sites (documented in my review of that provider), I was looking for a new provider with more reliable service, even if I had to pay a little more for it. It happens that, a few weeks ago, I was getting ready to move a site into its own domain name (the ChicaDeHoy.org fan site about the Latina singer and TV star Tatiana), and hence needed a hosting account for it. If "5-Bucks" had satisfied me with its services, I might have just started another account there for it alongside the two I already had for dantobias.com (my main personal site) and tiffany.org (a fan site about the singer Tiffany). But I was having continual trouble, so I decided to go with a different host for the new site, and if it worked out, to move the rest of my sites there as well.
This gave me a chance to use Epinions for its intended purpose, for consumer research, instead of just how I normally use it as a forum for recreational reading and writing. I checked out the top-rated web hosts here, read the reviews and surfed their websites, and ultimately found that DreamHost had the combination of account features and pricing that looked the most attractive to me, so I opened up an account there.
Their plans started as low as $9.95 a month (twice as expensive as "5-Bucks", but worth it if their service was more reliable), but I decided to go with the next tier of service, "Sweet Dreams" at $19.95/month (when I paid a year in advance). This gave more disk space, full CGI access, extra mailboxes, and the ability to create subdomains (sites with addresses like subsite.mydomain.com off of the mydomain.com domain you own). In all of their plans, paying a year in advance not only lowers the price, but also adds extra bonuses such as increased numbers of mailboxes, disk space, or subdomains.
DreamHost has made nearly all routine activities such as starting and cancelling accounts, adding and removing domains from an account, setting up mailboxes, etc., possible to do entirely through their automated control panel, untouched by human hands. I made the decision to start my account early in the morning on a Saturday, when there were most likely no humans in their premises, but the account began working immediately (since I paid by credit card; I think paying by check would delay it a few days until they receive your payment). (Actually, the domain, which I'd registered earlier and had on a free parking service elsewhere, took a day or two to propagate before the account was fully functional, but I could begin setting things up in the control panel and by FTP and Telnet immediately.)
I quickly found out that the account features were even better than advertised. The itemization of the plan's features said I got 5 subdomains, but the control panel told me I actually had 6. Also, it told me I had an unlimited number of parked, mirror, or redirected domains; this meant that in addition to the one fully-hosted domain name I had in the account, I could park as many other domains that I owned in the account and set them up to redirect to the URL of my choice (in my site or somebody else's), mirror my main site, or show a temporary under construction page. DreamHost's web site had offered free domain parking services if you register a domain with them, but it turned out that if you have an account with them (at least at the account level I had) you can park and redirect domains with them even if you had registered them elsewhere. I took advantage of this to close the free-parking accounts I had elsewhere for a couple of other domains (which forced an ugly ad frame on the pages seen by users) and instead use DreamHost to redirect them to appropriate URLs.
Then, by further experimentation, I determined that the unlimited free redirect domains applied also to subdomains; they let me create as many as I wanted of subdomains that redirect to other URLs. Even domains that were parked or redirected for free themselves could have subdomains with redirects to different URLs, and they didn't count against my quota of 6 subdomains (which only got used up when I created fully-hosted subdomains with separate websites directly at those URLs). I don't know if this capability is intentional or an unexpected hole in their system where they would have preferred to charge extra for such features... I'm afraid to ask! Meanwhile, it's very useful, as it lets me set up easy-to-remember subdomain addresses to redirect to various URLs both in my site and away from it (such as the URLs of discussion forums at Yahoo Groups that I set up in conjunction with my website, which I can link to at addresses like list.mydomain.com which redirect to their real, longer address.)
Another thing I could create unlimitedly was e-mail aliases. While I had a limit of 17 mailboxes (they advertised 15, but the Telnet account and FTP account you get with this account have mailboxes associated with them, bringing the total up by two), an unlimited number of aliases can be created in any of my domains hosted with them, including parked and redirected domains and subdomains. These aliases can go into any of the mailboxes in my account, or forward to any other email address. Thus, I can offer users of any of my sites free email aliases in the site's domain that forward to their email address somewhere else, and it doesn't cost me anything extra.
After a week of reliable service for my new site and for the redirected domains and subdomains, I decided to go ahead with moving the rest of my sites there, even though I still had a few months left of non-refundable prepaid service on my old hosting provider. (This was prompted by yet another service outage on that provider's part.) Since my account level with DreamHost provided only one fully-hosted domain, I needed to use their feature to add additional extras to the account. You can add such things as extra disk space, mailboxes, dedicated IP addresses, database service, etc.; some of these things are also included in higher service plans you can upgrade to. I used the "Extra Domain" feature. At $3.95 a month (if you pay a year in advance), it's much cheaper than getting a completely new account, and in fact even cheaper than hosting a new domain at my old "5 Bucks" provider. I thought I'd need to buy two additional domains at this price to host the two domains I was moving (which would have been a good deal), but when I added one extra domain, the control panel told me I now actually had 3 additional fully hosted domains, plus 3 additional subdomains and 3 additional parked, redirected, or mirror domains. That's another thing that I'm not sure if it was intentional or an oversight, but once again I'm afraid to ask!
The 3 extra parked / redirected / mirror domains were useless since my main plan already allowed an unlimited number of these (infinity plus three is still infinity), and I'm not up to my subdomain quota on the main plan yet, but the three fully hosted domains let me set up the two I was moving, and still have one more unused domain slot I could use in the future. (Update: When I checked in April, the add-on plan no longer showed the 3 parked domains available, so I guess the management of DreamHost realized the uselessness of that part and removed it.)
It's been over a week since I did this, and the account is still working fine. I'm now using three fully hosted domains, two fully hosted subdomains, two domains and five subdomains that redirect to other URLs, and am using 11.8 megabytes of a 125 MB disk space quota. The bandwidth quota is 5 GB per month, and my current usage level is on track for a little under 2 GB per month; that's actually much more popular than most personal sites, but it still leaves me room to more than double before extra bandwidth charges would kick in (and if I upgraded to a higher account level that would come with a bigger quota).
I'm getting my money's worth; considering the number of domains and subdomains I'm now hosting, the cost per site is actually less than my previous host and will go down even more if I add more sites to my account. I highly recommend this provider.
Update: As of mid April, things are still working well. I've had a few questions for tech support that were all answered in a reasonable time. The only significant outage of service that I noticed was that email stopped working for a few hours once. That was a constant occurrence with my previous provider, but apparently only a one-time fluke for this one, so I'm still happy. I've added more domains and subdomains to the account without increasing my bill (since they're all redirected to URLs instead of fully hosted), and have been able to do all the maintenence I need through the online control panel without having to pester their customer service department. There was a brief period near the beginning of March when things got a little bit flaky -- no serious service outages, but the control panel got slower and some requests took a long time to process. Maybe they were running some kind of maintenance process that was interfering with things. One other opinion here on Epinions says some bad things about DreamHost service, and seems to be based on the experience of somebody trying to sign up during this period. I was trying to register a domain through DreamHost at that time and it did take longer than it should have. But overall, service has been good for the price, and the features are excellent.
Recommended:
Yes
Monthly fees (US$): 23.90
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content
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Epinions.com ID:
dtobias
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Daniel Tobias
Location: Boca Raton, FL
Reviews written: 167
Trusted by: 94 members
About Me:
A programmer and Internet developer who's been a "computer geek" for over 20 years now.
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