Takumi's Blog

When I first got my web hosting, it was through iPowerWeb. Their hosting back in 2003 was good for it’s price, and the customer service then was also great. Something like 10GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth, with 3 mysql databases, 5 subdomains, and 1 domain. Now, they have 200GB of storage, 2TB of bandwidth, and well, the customer service sucks…

Since they had an easy way to setup a reseller account, back then I thought it was the best thing around. I could manage my clients hosting through it, without the clients having to deal with hosting. During 2005, all the hosting companies started upgrading their accounts, and that’s when I started looking at other hosting companies again.

I first tried midPhase, which was offering ‘unlimited bandwidth’, but after 3 days of using it, I felt like it just wasn’t right, and I took advantage of their moneyback guarantee. I looked at 1&1, bluehost, etc. but they just seemed like a corporation wanting to make money.

So, I had a problem. No hosting. The very next day, I stumbled upon DreamHost’s website, the design was different from what it is now, it really looked like a company that had lots of friendly employees and friendly customers. (They have the Website of the Month, community forums, etc.)

I bought the 2 year Code Monster plan, which is $15.95/mo. It used to be something like 60GB of storage and 600GB of bandwidth, and then last year they upped it to something like 400GB storage and 2TB bandwidth. (Now they’ve been slowly bringing it down, until their sales decline).

Key points:

• I admit I’ve had a few times where my server was down/unresponsive, every time customer support was great. They emailed me back within 2 hours, and even kept me up to date on the situation. (it ended up that another use on my server was abusing the resources), so overall I’m happy with their service (especially since it’s been getting more reliable now).
• They have one-click installs for a lot of software (to name a few, WordPress, Joomla, ZenCart, etc.), Shell access, Jabber chat server, PHP4 and PHP5, and the list just goes on!
• Even though the storage has been going down lately, when you buy an account, the storage starts going up for as long as you have the account!
• They offer their own ‘version’ of dedicated hosting (It’s the same as the Strictly Business plan, but you are put on a server for yourself, not a shared server).
• For each file you download off of your shared server, it can provide up to 500kb/s for each file!

A few things I wish:

• Redesign the control panel. There are a lot of dead links in the menu, and it’s sometimes really slow (I think the slowness has to do with how it handles cookies, because when I reset my cookies, it loads hella fast).
• Better Webmail. Whenever I get a domain that I’m going to be using email with, I always setup a Google Apps For Your Domain for that domain. I can’t stand DreamHost’s webmail.

Even with those two downsides, I still highly recommend DreamHost for cheap, good quality hosting.

I'm not finished with the design of my blog quite yet, please hold on while I fix the comments, archives, and search templates.