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Generally I'm rather happy with Dreamhost. Back when I first signed up it was relatively easy to get started and the features appealed to me as a geek. Prior to signing up I had several recommendations from friends and co-workers that swore by dreamhost's reliability, service and price. After using them for only a month I was rather impressed that at the time I recommended my employer as well as my co-worker sign up with dreamhost which they did. Later on I even offered to host clients under me if I did their web design and development.

However in this new year I cannot confidently recommend dreamhost after small problems after another started to build up over the last few months. First it was erratic slowness in connection followed by an occasional down time (maybe like an hour or two in a week's time) and it just went down hill from there.

As of Sunday I noticed that all of my sites would be down 90% of the time, or that one of their services would be (email for the most part stayed up, but mysql, httpd etc would be down). It's now thursday in the week, the issues are still unresolved, the dreamhost status page isn't offering much recent feedback and they've asked the community to refrain from submitting a trouble ticket.

Now I can understand the potential downtime of maybe a few hours if not a day in a year and such, but 5 days now is quite nerve racking as web development is my only means of income and I have existing clients yelling at me (thank god I don't use the phones due to my hearing impairment) wanting to know whats going on. As of this morning I've informed most of them that if they wish to find a new host I'll accommodate them in moving their site over to a new host. I can no longer in good conscious recommend them to this hosting provider due to the duration.

Worse yet I'm trying to advertise my services as a webdeveloper, and I been refraining from doing so in fear that Dreamhost's downtime would be perceived as a reflection of my own unreliability. This is certainly not what I would have perceived of a professional team, and if one thing failed I would have expected them to have had the proper level of redundancy not to have such a wide spread issue over such a long period of time (yes more than 6 hours is too long for any business on the web).

I want to try to wait it out and hope for the best, but financially I cannot help but seriously consider moving to another host asap. I also have a problem with their paypal no refund policy. Over the last year I have been paying into my account so that when my new billing year comes up this October I would already be paid up for next year, but if Dreamhost cannot deliver the service they promise and I need to move to another host I would expect a full refund of the credit amount I've accumulated in there for next year's hosting as I would not be utilizing it. It pains me to feel the need to move but it seems like every time I find a good host they go south so soon that I start to wonder if all hosting providers are pretty much the same.

-Karl Blessing
http://www.karlblessing.com (if they ever get the hosting working)

It's taken over an hour to check in 10 static html files. Is subversion always this slow or is something wrong?

I'm at 16MB average/month. Well under my 526GB limit. What gives?