I recently just created my 1st ever Drupal site. I had heard good things about Dreamhost and since my client was paying, we just went ahead and paid for the whole year in advance. This ended up being a huge mistake. I would also like to preface this with the fact that our site is extremely small. Small in the sense that it has about 5 nodes, no custom mods (besides fckeditor), and the only person logging in is the administrator to make updates to the content.
That said, the site is beyond slow. I am talking unusable slow. To log in it takes 30 seconds, with page loads around 15 seconds. After e-mailing them this is the response I get:
"I'm sorry to hear that you are having problems. Unfortunately Drupal does not run very efficiently on shared hosting servers such as the one you are on. This is one of the reasons we do not officially support it. For the best Drupal performance we recommend that you upgrade to a DreamHostPS server which you can read about athttp://www.dreamhostps.com. Its dedicated hosting without the dedicated price. There are no steps we can take to make Drupal run faster on your current plan. Yes you are on the blingy cluster but Drupal runs slow regardless of which cluster you are on."
The first time I e-mailed them, they told me it was because I was on the Blingy Cluster, a cluster which was full of users and extremely slow. They sent me a link to a blog about it where they basically tried to make light of the fact that one of their servers was completely messed up. A few weeks later when it is still slow I get this response where they try to upsell me. Completely disappointing.
Comments
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are you within the money back guarantee period? Have you asked that they move you to a new server?
A small site like the one you described should work just fine in a standard shared environment.
~silverwing
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Land of Midnight | MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS
Had the same problem.
Dreamhost is notoriously slow. It's their MySQL servers that cause the problem.
I left them last year because of the same thing. I even wrote an article about it.
This looks quite common in the Shared Web Hosting solution
I have seen many shared web hosting companies fall into the trouble of MySQL performance, the same thing I have met with iPower. But, unfortunately, this issue will have to wait till you try their service, then you will know.
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No I do not think we are
No I do not think we are within the period (I'm assuming its 30 days or less). Unfortunately we signed up with them, and the first day I worked on it I chalked up the slow access to the bar's wi-fi that I am in. Then after that I waited a few weeks to continue working on it. I guess I could ask to be moved to a different server but judging from this guy's response I doubt it will happen. I just don't get it. While I've never ran any other drupal sites I have ran plenty of phpbb which has extensive database use and have never had any problems on any other hosting. Does anyone think I could backcharge my card?
If anyone wants to check it out, my website address is www.4moreappointments.com Its only about half done, but tell me if I am being unreasonable or not in regards to the speed. Keep in mind that the pages load up a lot faster than they do when I am in the administration panel.
You may be in luck
Dreamhost actually has a rather long money-back period. 97 days.
--
John Forsythe
Drupal Modules - Find the module you need for your project!
Maybe a little slow ...
Then again it's 2:30am on the east coast, I don't know how it looks at say 9:30pm
Do you have caching enabled?
Steve
We had the same problem
We also had problems with Dreamhost. When we were developing our site, it would take forever for a page to load, and there were only two people using it!
We complained about the slowness to Dreamhost. They replied that they were in the process of physically moving their servers, and they wouldn't be able to address our concerns until the move was over. Whenever that would be...
We switch to Verio the next day, and haven't had any problems. Also, we have since made our site live (www.freetime.com) and the pages are loading quickly.
~kdreger
That is disappointing news.
That is disappointing news. I've been involved in the web hosting industry for many years and Drupal should run just fine on a shared hosting server. Sorry to hear of your troubles!
would not recommend them at all.
I strongly agree, !
I have been with them for four months so far, a lot of problems with their sever. My site if it's not down, it's very slow. I would not recommend them at all.
The situation may have changed...?
I'm using dreamhost for a couple low traffic sites and for those sites wasn't bothered by the slow page loading times. Though, to be honest, I never saw it taking as long as 30 seconds .. but yeah it was slow. According to the stats on the google sitemap service (Google reports the crawl time and average page loading time during crawls) the averages were much slower with my sites hosted on dreamhost than elsewhere.
In any case around the time I upgraded to Drupal 6, the page loading time drastically improved. It's plausible this is due to Drupal 6 rather than due to Dreamhost.
As to "no steps they can take to improve Drupal performance" ... oh, puhleeze. mod_php and eAccelerator or the like, right? Sheesh.
So I'm curious how y'all think about Drupal on Dreamhost now. Did y'all see any change?
- David Herron - http://7gen.com/
+ David Herron - 7gen.com/, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com/drupal-blogging-hints
They may be afraid to mess
They may be afraid to mess with the configuration of their servers too much. I used to work as a customer service rep for a web hosting company. I remember our customers would tell us all the time, "oh just do this to increase performance." Unfortunately, if we did that, it would often cause weird problems for other sites on our servers. So after a while we didn't want to implement anything new without heavy testing.
Honestly I'm on dreamhost
Honestly I'm on dreamhost with many drupal sites on one account and it's not slow! I'm in europe and the servers are in the US. I don't know what fast means to you, but I manage all my sites from europe and it's fast enough, I can't go faster than that, when I submit a new node, I wait maybe 2-3 seconds and then the next page is there.
I have cache enabled on all my drupal sites because I know that without cache enable, it would be using too much resources.
I'm on dreamhost since december 2006, I tested for some time and then took their 10 years plan. I don't know that it's slow because I also have a webhost in germany and the drupal sites are the same speed, more or less, it's not noticeable anyway.
I'm running multiple small
I'm running multiple small sites/blogs with Drupal on DreamHost with a very basic PS server. I do have XCache and mod_fcgid enabled.