DreamHost launches DreamObjects cloud storage service | Hacker News Reader

DreamHost launches DreamObjects cloud storage service

dreamhost.com

56 pointstga16 comments

DreamHost is known more for its low prices than its reliability.

Look at the blurb on Inktank that starts "Inktank is the company delivering Ceph—the massively scalable, open source, distributed storage system" . Follow the link at the end to http://www.inktank.com and the webpage just shows a default successful Apache page: "The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet" .

This press release is over ten days old.

I wouldn't trust them with anything serious.

We've been using Ceph and the S3-compatible radosgw at a small scale while building http://www.pogoapp.com and I have no real complaints. It's a very new technology and even things like running a cluster backup aren't yet possible, but Dreamhost has been providing its customers a free beta for a while now, the program is under heavy development, has Dreamhost and Shuttleworth providing funding, and the devs on IRC are quite helpful and responsive. And it's being integrated into OpenStack

It looks like Ceph is still waiting on stable btrfs to truly shine (http://ceph.com/docs/master/rec/filesystem/), but overall the technology looks very promising and works well today, with a small number of groups running large multi-rack storage clusters (e.g. I believe it runs DreamHost's entire backup system)

Not sure if you are trying to criticize Dreamhost, Ceph or Inktank.

I couldn't find a link that didn't work, but even if there was one I'm not sure that a marketing website says much about an underlaying storage platform.

That is really disappointing. We have been talking about setting up a Ceph pilot at work, but now I'm not so sure.

dreamhost has failed for us so many times in the last 5 years that I don't care to keep count. I'm guessing more than 10 major fuckups. Even things that I thought they couldn't possibly screw up, they have. We have finally moved everything away from dreamhost. I now use it only for things that can go down for days on end and nobody will care. dreamhost is definitely not to be trusted with anything more critical than that.

On the other hand, I've had two domains at DH for years and, apart from the well-known problems in 2006, have never had an issue.

One of the sites got hacked because of a buggy WordPress plugin and DH support were great in helping fix it.

I agree that DNS caching is slow to catch up though. My ISP's cache took only an hour or two whereas DH's cache took several hours to reflect my new records.

Hm. I don't trust their hosting very much (it's cheap shared hosting, never really expected to), but I've kept some domains and DNS with them and never had a problem. I've thought about moving, but keep staying because there's no compelling reason to change.

Care to give me compelling reasons to change?

Honestly, there probably isn't a really compelling reason to switch, if you've been able to survive through DNS caching. Dreamhost's customer service is good, and their problems mostly stem from the fact that they do the exact same thing every other budget shared hosting platform does: oversell like crazy, cross their fingers, and hope that their users don't actually use all the storage and bandwidth they've been promised. The only difference I can see is that Dreamhost is probably the most popular such service, so that strategy bites them in the ass more often than others.

For me, though, having relied on more than just registration and DNS through Dreamhost and gotten screwed too many times, moving to Webfaction made a world of difference. Their shared plan isn't as solid as dedicated hosting would be, but at least I can say I get what I pay for. With Dreamhost, that much wasn't true.

I've actually been thinking of moving away from DH too. Out of curiosity, where did you move to, which host?

Thanks.

For shared hosting needs, I moved form DH to Webfaction years ago. Haven't looked back.

I just made this move a couple days ago after DreamHost silently dropping emails, among their history of outages and server restarts. Comparing the two, I was surprised at how fully featured DreamHost really is, but aside from a few small things the migration has been smooth and I am hoping uptime will be better.

Interesting to see a budget host enter this arena, but it makes sense.

Pricing culled from the press release:

- Usage billing: 7 cents per month

- Prepaid: plans go below 5 cents to store 50 TB or more

- Transfer out: 7 cents per GB

Wow, glad to see this space heating up with newcomers like Nimbus.io and Ceph at about half the cost per GB. This is huge for storage consumers.

Now there's S3, Rackspace, Google and MS on the "low latency" end. Then there's Amazon Glacier on the very very high latency (hours!) low cost side of the spectrum, with Nimbus.io and Dreamhost in the middle.

Interesting, What would be more interesting is some stats on reliability, seen as their reputation is one of mass, cheap, hosting.

I had several clients on DreamHost and all of them have had some kind of problem, whether it's unacceptable downtime or MySQL DBs crashing and not being restored for 3+ days. I've spent a lot of time and effort moving clients off of DreamHost, so I don't know how I feel about this.

This is an interesting move for DreamHost. They built Ceph, and have been using it internally for ages now.

I wonder if they're going to transform their reputation as a no-frills budget web host.

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