Fed Up With Dreamhost: Horrible Hosting Company

April 28th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Summary
I’ve now officially begun my search for a new web hosting provider. Having had increasingly bad service from Dreamhost since Day 1, it has taken me this long to finally bite the bullet and search for a new host because I was naive in paying for 2 years of hosting up front. As of now I have about 18 months of time left on my account, but due to the horrible service, I’m ready to abandon the account in favor of a host who is able to provide response times less than 500ms.

Dreamhost Sucks
When I first started using the service, the ping times were 50-100ms on a daily basis. I signed up in August of 2007 after, I had thought, doing my research. I saw a good amount of stories on the net about problems with Dreamhost, but saw a good amount of stories about people being happy with them too. After about a month of useage my ping times jumped to 400-1000ms daily and have not improved since. I live in Alexandria VA and have a 5mbit Cox Cable connection. My girlfriend lives in Arlington VA and has a 6mbit Comcast Cable connection, and my employer has a DIRECT ACCOUNT with Cogent, a 100mbit connection. I get pings to google of about 5-15ms at work and download speeds of upwards of 6000+KB/sec. AT ALL THREE LOCATIONS MY PINGS ARE 500+ms. I work downtown Washington DC, just a few blocks from the Whitehouse. One cannot claim that I’m out in the “boonies” or somesuch. I’ve submitted report tickets for months, having been blown off repeatedly by Dreamhost support techs, all saying it was my issue, not theirs.

More Research
Searching around on the net this morn has uncovered many many many many other blog posts about similar experiences as mine. From deceptive business practices to incompetent technicians, it seems I’m not the only person having issues. So, thus begins my search of new hosting providers. I’ve asked on Twitter for people to give me recommendations. I’ve also begun my own search. So far I am looking at these hosts: