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> I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not great, but it's better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else.

It's notably worse than a number of other commodity experiences I've had.

Dreamhost aggressively oversells. They're hardly unique in this, but they admit and embrace it like nobody else I've seen.

Because of this, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to in order for everything to actually work. If you break the unwritten rules (even if you haven't broken the written ones), they will shut you down (sometimes without notice) and accept your cranky departure if you're unhappy about it.

Or maybe before then they'll have a severe service outage that causes you grief, make a funny blog post about it, and despite your amusement, you'll get the sense that something wasn't really addressed and leave.

If I had to recommend any shared hosting I've been on, it'd be Hurricane Electric. Over the decade I kept a small account there, my experience was the opposite of Dreamhost: they may have given less for the price, but they stood totally behind it (and a little further) and were always up.

I've been with Dreamhost for quite a long time. Dreamhost is like a decent all-you-can-eat sushi bar. Not the best product, but it's worth the money you pay.

As you said though, their goofy attitude toward outages and such isn't good. I like the transparency of their status site, but when shit goes wrong I don't want a cat-meme reference.

The sushi bar is a decent analogy.

I use dreamhost as a sort of project sandbox, and for that it works pretty well. If you need a place to do a one-click install of wordpress or some other project, or just a shell to bypass some firewall, upload some large files for a while, it's great.

I would never, ever put anything where I needed real uptime on Dreamhost, because performance varies wildly. If a project was getting serious, I'd use Linode, Rackspace, or Amazon.

I also recommend to everyone that they separate out their domain name purchases from their hosting provider.

I make it a point to always separate the following things, especially with services that I run for others:

    Domain name purchases
    DNS hosting
    Email hosting
    Web hosting

That way any of the layers in the stack can be replace with sufficient planning and if, say, email is down then the web hosting should still work.

With it's low price point and a very user friendly admin panel, I too would recommend Dreamhost's shared hosting service. I've had a good experience with their customer service and they have some nice bells and whistles such as automated backups, PageSpeed, Railgun (cloudflare), being carbon neutral, etc.

We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans. As you would imagine, the server performance on any shared hosting depends on you and your neighbors adhering to them.

I'll agree with you, shutting down a customer without notice is not acceptable. Maybe if a customer is actively trying to scam the hosting provider by violating the terms... but I think even in that case, customer should be given a 24 hour eviction notice so that they have time to transition elsewhere.

> We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites.

If you look carefully, you can find providers of shared hosting who will be honest about what they're selling you in terms of capacity and that you can rely on.

DreamHost is not one of those businesses.

> There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans.

Something something the road to hell something...

Seconded. When Dreamhost works, it is excellent. When it fails, it fails really, really badly and the support is often shockingly inept.

Just two examples from my painful membership:

1. I transferred a domain back into Dreamhost. Due to a bug in their system, it was immediately dropped and entered the redemption period, and asked me for a large redemption fee. Support was wholly unable to acknowledge any problem on their part, and only resolved it when I posted the issue on Webhostingtalk.com

2. After requesting a refund onto my credit card after another hideous incident, rather than crediting my card, they debited it. Again, support were completely unable to acknowledge any problem on their part. Instead, when I asked the reason why my card was debited, they said I was charged for "services" - but were unable to itemise the services I had been charged for when challenged. They only refunded the money as "courtesy" rather than an acknowledgement on their part.

Dreadful.

If your storage requirements are small, I strongly recommend medialayer.com. For a budget option, I recommend asmallorange.com

> and the newer Rackspace Cloud stuff

We've used Rackspace Cloud and Linode for several years and found Rackspace Cloud performance to be significantly worse than Linode for CPU and IO. Like, not even close. Prices are about the same. Support experiences are also similar (quick, competent responses from both sides).

The only reason we keep the Rackspace stuff around is because we want to have a relatively wide separation between our production webservices and our website / monitoring so that if one goes down that we can announce / detect that from a wholly separate network.

I'd second this. Particularly CPU performance on Rackspace has been hugely worse than Linode on comparatively sized instances. To the point I've had to use 8GB instances on Rackspace for CPU bound tasks which are fine on 1 or 2GB Linode instances.

We're currently considering a migration from Rackspace to Linode for this very reason so we'll temporarily be running a complete version of our infrastructure on both and replaying traffic on both.

Once we've done this I'll try and post some detailed benchmarks.

I use both Rackspace and Linode. Both have been pretty good but Rackspace has been phenomenally reliable - I'm talking 100% uptime for the past couple of years (according to Pingdom) for my main service. Linode has been less reliable, though not bad by industry standards. I am planning to launch a new product next year. Will definitely be using Rackspace for it - that reliability is worth the extra expense and lower spec.

Shared hosting is tricky. There are a million brands and lots of flavors of the week. The really small guys, some of them are probably great. It's really hard to tell though, they are 1-2 person operations that last for who knows how long. The scaling/growth problems causes a lot of pain for the owners/operators and customers. Scaling up takes a lot of skill, and then many of them get bought out by a bigger company. And then your service and experience change, especially if it was a couple person operation.

All those unscalable things they did for you to get and keep your business? They don't last forever.

So you decide to use a bigger company. And it's not the same, but it's generally more reliable. And some of those companies do a much better job than others. Some are actually pretty good. You like RackSpace, there are a few companies out there that people like as much if not more too. A few even compete in the shared hosting space.

I track most of these big companies and dreamhost is middle of the pack. Better than GoDaddy but below some other brands.

Take a look for yourself: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare

Maybe next time someone asks you about it, you can let them figure out what they need. No company is perfect, but some are definitely better liked by their customers than others.

You ought to kick in a little disclaimer that you run Reviewsginal. :)

Sorry if that wasn't clear. I thought saying I was tracking this data made it obvious. Apologies if that caused any confusion.

Rackspace is the best that our company has ever used. The expense is a factor, though, and many smaller sites aren't willing to bear that burden and that is where the likes of Media Temple comes in. They host most of the smaller sites we manage and I've been quite happy with them. That said, anytime I've had to deal with GoDaddy it has been a huge pain in the ass and I am not confident that this move is a good one for Media Temple's users.

I share a similar opinion. I compare every host I deal with to Rackspace. I have dealt with them from early on 6+ years ago with their dedicated servers and mail. Their support is the real deal and if you need a managed service level I would not think twice about using them. That being said though if you are going unmanaged you're going to pay a lot more to use Rackspace than other companies.

I've been a delighted Rackspace user for over a decade (!!) now. Recently switching from dedicated server to their cloud service.

They also have a startup program where they'll subsidize $1000 of hosting for six months: http://rackspacestartups.com/

Rackspace instances, no issues.

Rackspace cloud sites, terribly unpredictable performance with frequently obscene (20s+) latency, then categoric denial of actual measured issues for months... followed by begrudging admission, a swap of networking hardware, and a respite for a few months... until it all starts again. This pattern is much too frequent in their forums. I suspect they assume the customer's code is always at fault, so won't really look into their network layers unless coerced. A real shame.

will upvote with reservations (don't want too many people there, but I think they have handled popularity rather well)

I have three instances at rackspace cloud, and all three have 100% uptime for 4+ years. Could not be happier. Of course, running debian stable might have some to do with that.