Rats, I have finally learned their whole stupid system, which now that I have learned it, it seems far superior.

Very sad…

99.9%???

I have been running this site since the fifteenth of september and so far have had four times when the site is inaccessible?

Buy DNS service elsewhere.
Buy email service elsewhere.
Buy additional webspace elsewhere.

…

I think … just going elsewhere would be easier

If you’re looking for unreliable, bargain-basement hosting, this is probably normal. A lot of old-timers here weren’t looking for that when they went with DH (it used to be more expensive and a lot more reliable). ::shrug:: Time to move on if you need a reliable service again.

Before this latest snafu, my Typo-powered blog was (finally!) up and running. When they had their problem, however, my blog (at the above addy) died and refused to get back up.

I tried installing the WordPress one-click install, and that seems to be working just fine (http://www.batchelorcreative.com/cim/), but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why the Typo install broke so thoroughly.

(Yeah, it’s giving me the “500″ error, and yes, I’ve followed the tips on the wiki about Typo installs on DH… of course, I’ve tried so many different things by now that I am not quite certain which way is “up” so any advice would be quite welcome!)

$47.40 to be exact. They lowered the monthly fee to $3.95.

i also have an account at SiteGround. they moved my account to another server without even giving a warning, so when some of my skripts failed (i use domain redirect, so it’s often not possible to use domain-links) i filled in a support ticket (u only get 7 of those free btw O.O;; ) they were all like “oh we just moved it. bye”. a lot worrying for nothing. a week later, my cpanel started to provide wrong disk usage info, waited 2 tickets on that and they old me that they’d fix it at the next server update (has been weeks, nothing was done) and now they even limited my CPU usage without even advising or offering any help. i know that i shouldnt abuse CPU, but i only use 150gig bandwith out of 900gig “offered” and about 47% of the disk space. but hell, they dun care.

so, DH might have some problems altelly, but they are a lot better than many other hosting providers (with SG being the worst i know) and at least they do not leave you in uncertainly. sure, the level of support (which is totaly up to them) could be improved, but at least they PROVIDE free support.

i’d say, think before bashing a service, it might not be ha;f as bad as the other ones.

Which is a far cry from the hundreds of thousands Dreamhost has had to invest in their infrastructure, only recently; not to mention the headaches and time. Uptime costs real money, technical skill, plus good management of resources. Weighed against how much any given business process is worth, with time factored in. And *ALWAYS factor in for Murphy’s Law.

In the book/movie, “the world according to Garp”, Garp watches an airplane crash into a house and immediately tries to purchase the house; because the odds of such a disaster happening a 2nd time are so much lower than the first. I think this will hold true for Dreamhost too, having been through what they’ve been through.

FWIW, I used to run all my servers out of my home office. Since I discovered Dreamhost, and what they provide me with, well when I read of a hard disk failing and how fast it gets replaced, with redundant data, that $7.95 a month is *nothing*.

First, buy a domain. To be clear, a domain is a record (as in records management), plus some technical DNS stuff. Manage the records somewhere, and leave the technical DNS to zoneedit.

You need to pay an $10 year for failover service with zoneedit. You also need to buy hosting on multiple hosts (like Dreamhost), possibly in different continents if you’re really trying to spread risk. You also want to replicate your sites from a master, using rsync or unison or some such technique.

The way it works is really quite simple. Every 5 minutes zoneedit requests a page from your site, and expects it to be returned. If for whatever reason the request is unsuccessful, zoneedit removes that site/host from the DNS system, and diverts all traffic to your site/host kept in reserve, until the page requests come back successfully. So the downtime is theoretically max’d out at 5 minutes. There are no limits to how many host in reserve you can use.

I hope this info is more clear, and y’all find it useful. I understand lots of folks use dyndns, I have no idea if they, or others provide a similar service. Sorry folks, if I have used inaccurate terminology.

FWIW, my sites are still running at 200% previous speed. I can see this precisely because I use an extension called FasterFirefox which places a little stopwatch/counter at the bottm, and times each page’s loading.