the pavel

Having freelanced for some time, I’ve run into my share of good and bad hosts.  So far, my initial impressions of DreamHost are quite good.  

Yes, this is partially shameless self-promotion.  DreamHost will pay me to refer people to them.  They’ll pay you too.  This is standard practice among hosts and all legitimate businesses looking to maximize their ad dollars.  Word-of-mouth is the cheapest and most effective form of advertising.   Here’s my shameless self-promotion link: click it!. If you click it and sign up with them, I get $$$. If you want me to share, let me know, we could work something out. This isn’t about DreamHost’s referral program. This is about why they were the right host for me this time:

1. Cost – They ran an incredible promotion immediately after New Year’s – 95% off a two year hosting agreement.  Alas, I signed up too late to take advantage of that exact promotion, but I still received 80% off my two-year cost.  Yes, I’m 100% sure I will pay more to renew than I paid initially.  Still, I treat this as an investment and couldn’t find anyone cheaper, even the fly-by-night outfits.    

2. Value – the difference between actual cost and the cost one is willing to pay.   I’ve hosted with LunarPages, iPowerWeb, H-Sphere and even Rackspace. None of them come close to the features I get with DreamHost even if I did pay the full price (about $220 for two years, roughly $9/month).  Rackspace lost me with extra charges for EVERYTHING.  Truth be told, they have amazing customer service, but in today’s economic climate, it doesn’t justify the cost for me.  I’ll wait on hold a couple minutes extra.  Also, with DreamHost, out of the gate, I had PHP5, mySQL5 (Lunarpages, H-SPHERE and iPowerWeb have it available, but it’s a hassle), shell access, unlimited accounts, Google Apps, one-click installs (more on that later),  Jabber, SVN.  These were either extra at the other hosts, unavailable, or a hassle to set up.

3. Ease of use.  I spent a week on a private server with Lunarpages setting up a current version of SVN.  That’s a week in spurts of activity, so not a solid 168 hours, probably closer to 10.  At the end, I had no externally accessible repository.  mod_dav_svn could not be installed on the server and svnserve wouldn’t hook into inetd due to an old version of apache and inetd that I wasn’t able to upgrade on a private server.  I now have two repositories running on DreamHost.  It took all of 5 min per repository.   It seems they thought this through and created a product for people who are too busy to play system administrator.  Good for them; very good for me.  

4. One-click installs. Yes, setting up WP is easy.  But I don’t want to do it. After installing it for others and customizing it, I don’t want to have to do it for myself too.  It’s nice to click a button and have them run a script with the latest stable version to be installed into my domain.  Same for ZenCart, dotProject and a few other goodies (hopefully more to come)

5. Control.  I know, I mentioned this before.  But it actually means a lot to me to have shell access to my account and be able to manage my sites through a shell.  It’s significantly faster than using FTP to edit and sync files. I’m surprised more hosts don’t offer this feature at no cost since it’s already on the shared server.  Additionally, their Panel is much easier to use than others I’ve worked with — consistent organization, no weird redirects to other domains to manage mysql, no attempt to get me to use some bogus file manager from the web (seriously, isn’t that why there’s FTP and shell?), no separate support site, just clean and functional.

It wouldn’t be fair to mention something I don’t like about DreamHost.  I tried installing Trac.  It took a couple days.  There’s no one-click installer available, but Petar Marić had a very decent set of scripts to make this easier.  Had I followed his instructions to begin with, I would’ve been done much sooner.