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Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

Dreamhost seems popular and cheap, but people also like complaining about them.

On DreamHost right now. Went down a few times, but not a big deal - uptime for my server has been crystal the past few months.

You'll hear that "DreamHost sucks" all the time. Keep in mind that they host around 700,000 domains, and operate thousands of servers, so there will be an inevidably huge amount of people complaining. (Of course, people don't usually rant about how great the service is, so that gets lost in the noise.)

The fact that they're a lot more transparent (http://www.dreamhoststatus.com) than a lot of providers is good, but only makes people complain more (The thinking is: 'It went down! I must complain about the service being terrible.' rather than with traditional hosting providers, where you probably weren't aware of the downtime, unless if you personally experienced it.)

My suggestion: if it's not mission-critical, DreamHost is a good, very reasonably priced choice.

A recent gem from http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/05/21/blingy-problems/al...

Holy crap, that's been over a week. I pity the fool who put something mission-critical on there.

Been using them for years now, no major complaints. They stay on top of Rails tech, which is really cool. I wouldn't risk a business site with them, but for fun piddly sites, I dig 'em.

Seconded. Dreamhost seem to get quite a bit of flak due to their size, but I have an account with them for "secondary" stuff and it works excellently for that. I'd only use my own dedicated servers for the proper stuff though :)

I also use Dreamhost for my secondary stuff. It's great as a staging server although you don't have full control over the server. If anybody wants $50 off the first year (that makes it reeeeeeallllyyy cheap per month), you can use the promo code LIFEHACKER.

For virtual dedicated, I use Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com) to host The Photo Stream (http://www.thephotostream.com) and they have been excellent for the past two months.

Or use "WPDH2" as a promo code and get some additional storage and bandwidth (http://www.dreamhost.com/wordpress.html)

I've been using Dreamhost for a while now (to host my blog) and it has been pretty much okay but I wouldn't host any critical stuff on it.

WebFaction (http://www.webfaction.com) and Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com) are pretty popular lately (although not _that_ cheap). I would probably go with webfaction for a django app.

Dreamhost has their problems, but like someone else commented they are very open about everything. Whenever I have had a problem their tech support has responded pretty quickly and fixed whatever was going wrong. I'm pretty happy with them overall. I only use it for my blog, and as a test bed for some stuff. I'm not sure I would run anything important there.

DH is crap. Them being open does not detract from the fact that their servers keel over every time your site gets a bit more traffic. I left them and never looked back.

Also stay away from Joyent.

Depending on your needs, Media Temple might work. And a friend swears by Royalty Hosting although I haven't tried them.

I'm playing with Mosso at the moment and they seem good.

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