Dreamhost, yet another forum topic about webhos(t)ing

I don't think is comment is off-base personally.
Some modules could definitely use optimization of queries.

I'm more concerned about the word "tuned."

I've read about some phpsessid problems, and running Drupal under php-cgi, but anything else?

Currently working on a site and with just the people working on it performance is not all that good. They are thinking of moving elsewhere for production.

I still have an account with them, because for most things they are great. And they really are a solid company born.

But they have their databases on separate servers, and I found that A+ response times on html pages degraded to C- response times with dynamic sites -- especially Drupal.

So there it is. Good company, but not ideally configured for Drupal.

Laura
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pingVision • rare pattern • scattered sunshine

tip: type in "SUPREME" in the promo code bit and you get up to $97 off, and the $49.95 setup fee waived..

nice to know :)

Laura and Nevets, thanks for the feedback. I'm disappointed but looking elsewhere. I'm really glad that I contacted sales and cleared things up before we paid for a year of hosting!

When I last looked at Dreamhost, they had daily limits on the number of mySQL queries you could perform on each account.

It looks like they're suggesting that some Drupal plugins cause a lot of database queries, which will cause you to hit the limit sooner than if you were using a different CMS.

Dreamhost do seem to be a very good and reliable business, but you might be better looking for somebody who doesn't limit your queries. It's difficult to predict how many queries the site will perform every day, and it's another limit to worry about along with your bandwidth and CPU usage.

demolicious | leafish

I just signed up with Dreamhost in november and it has lived up to it's name. I think what they said is true, but mostly because of the following reasons:

• The modules are not all efficient. Compound this with the fact that there are a ton of modules actually out there (ie. in CVS). Statistically, a lot of users are probably using old or poorly written modules.
• As far as special tuning, the hardest thing I had to do was to customize my .htaccess file. They even had directions on how to do this in the knowledge base, but still got back to me from a support request with more specific directions.
• The Cache: I doubt the majority of drupal users know of or even use this feature.

My friend put up a news site and got hotlinked from rawstory.com and buzzflash.com on the same day, and it brought down his whole server. Once we turned on the cache, the server load went down to normal levels immediately. The biggest problem in that incident was the MySQL queries, not bandwidth... So turning on the cache brought down the query load quite a bit.

Other than that, i must say dreamhost is phenomenal. I don't know anywhere else you get unlimited domains AND unlimited databases. Not to mention i now have 1 TB/month bandwith (yeah, i said it. terabyte) and 20 gigs of storage... with drupal, this means just about unlimited websites, since you can always pay for more bandwidth.

I've got many sites mirroring one set of drupal files, all pointing to different databases, so really totally different websites. This makes upgrading ridiculously easy. I upload (or update) a module and it's available for all my sites to use.

I guess this is a feature of any multi-domain hosting company, I'm just saying it works particularly smooth with dreamhost.

ok, that's enough.

my three cents.

When I first did business with Dreamhost, I think they had only four servers at the time. They had wonderful support.

Then they had a problem with a hacker. They were doing backups on a secondary drive in the same server. Unfortunately, the hacker not only wiped out sites, but he wiped out backups as well.

Oh, well. As Forrest Gump said, "It happens." But Dreamhost went silent. They didn't post anything on their forum, didn't post anything on their website otherwise, didn't reply to support requests. I had my own fresh backups - I had the site set up so that when someone posted, I got a copy of it in the mail - but others lost everything, and we were all wondering if Dreamhost was closing their doors or what.

I ended up getting my own server not too long after that, and waste is a sin, right? I ended up becoming a hosting company. Ended up with five servers, and customers in Europe, Asia, Australia. The sun never set on my empire, and the stress finally got to me, and on the recommendation of my doctor and the insistance of my wife, I got rid of the hosting business, and moved back to Dreamhost.

Except that they've been having trouble with Blingy, the file server my account depends on. There's a notice up on the support pages saying

We're currently experiencing problems with the blingy cluster affectingweb, mysql and mail services. The file server is being worked on, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you.

You can keep updated at dreamhoststatus.com! (posted 22 hours 35 mins ago)

Except that at http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/19/filer-problems-with-blingy-clu... there is a notice that was posted 6 days, 8 hours ago, saying

We are currently having a problem with a filer which has crashed and is recovering at this time. While this is happening some customers in the blingy cluster will experience problems loading their websites/email. We apologize for the outage and service is expected to return to normal as soon as the filer recovers.

UPDATE 3:01:AM PDT

The filer has finished recovering and all services are back up and running. We are working with the filer vendor to find the source of the crash to prevent any further outages.

Update 24/03/08 10am: We’re working on the file server again to alleviate the load that’s causing problems with web, mail and mysql services. Sorry about that.

It's not getting better. It's getting worse. Previously, my sites were very unresponsive at times. Last night, I posted a new blog entry, and this morning, it had disappeared. And now entire sites are unavailable. Apache reports "bad httpd" error.

Does Drupal work OK on Dreamhost? Sure. Are there poorly-scripted plug-ins? Probably. But the chief problem is that Dreamhost really hasn't a clue when it comes to providing support. Yes, stuff happens, but you don't treat customers like mushrooms. If I had an idea what was going on, I could be tolerant. As it is, I'm going to seek a refund, because they aren't giving me the hosting I paid for.