Lovecraft Forest

Hopefully not too visible, this blog has moved hosting services. Having a requirement for some new technology support (PHP5, Ruby, SSH, etc.), I decided to move my services to another web host. Since most of my sites are “just for fun”, I didn’t see the need for an expensive dedicated host, so I began investigating shared hosting alternatives. I had very much liked the service I had received from Hostexcellence, but their current policy to eschew newer technologies took them out of the running. After some research, DreamHost’s “CodeMonster” offer seemed to be a good fit. Recommendation from Wordpress.org sealed the deal. What did I have to lose? 97 day money back guarantee.

Well, I didn’t lose anything, but it didn’t work out either. After two weeks of running a few sites (including Wordpress, MediaWiki, and Gallery2), I constantly ran into load spikes on their mySQL service and FTP performance drops that were pretty severe. How severe? Some mySQL queries (such as displaying this blog) failed to complete after five minutes. FTP performance (and HTTP as well) sometimes dropped to 20% of “normal” speeds. Traceroute tended to reveal nothing out of the ordinary, but that was all customer support could think of. (Looking at the mySQL logs was apparently too much of a chore.) All they would tell me is “everything is fine here.” Apparently they didn’t realize I was running parallel sites elsewhere to compare.

Did I mention DreamHost’s tech support? Expect to wait 24 hours for the first “run tracehost” reply. No telephone. No live chat. It became clear that their expectation was for me to diagnose their server problems. After some investigation, I came to a simple conclusion–the spikes that so severely hampered performance were coming from chronic server overloading. Googling the web for DreamHost seems to confirm this is an institutional problem, and while I’m not one to give into the “xxx sucks” of the blogosphere, there are way too many stories that are disturbingly similar to my own experience.

To cut an already too long story short. I’ve migrated this blog to Site5. Performance seems good. Support is readily at hand (I needed some help with designing a security system for some FTP clients) and responds in minutes. PHP5 support allows MediaWiki to install without a hitch. Moreover, Site5 makes their monitoring tools accessible to you can see what’s going on with the server. They even give you a static IP so you can work with your account right away!

I’ll keep a close eye on this service and update you on how things work out with Site5. If you’re looking at DreamHost, based on my two weeks of frustration, I suggest you reconsider. Site5 and Hostexcellence look like they will treat you much better!