Dreamhost Review
A client of mine had been using Godaddy for all his websites in the past. Part of my task was to load about 10 million rows into a database table. I found some workarounds with Godaddy but everything was just slow. Attempting to run a few long queries through PHPMyAdmin resulted in a timeout. Obviously, this is problematic with a 10 million row database, especially if you need to perform maintenance or make a change on the rows. It wasn’t worth it to buy a dedicated server just to run a long query every now and then.
I started looking for a new host and stumbled upon Dreamhost. I had read some positive reviews and a couple negative, but overall it looked good so I suggested he switch. Developing the site on Dreamhost has been night and day compared to Godaddy. Since they provide shell access, all the workarounds I created for Godaddy became one basic shell script. Dreamhost does limit the number of processes per account or user. I tried running 2 instances of my import script and they were both terminated, but I can’t complain because this keeps their services running consistently. Another problem I had was that they decided to reboot the server half way through an import. Third and fourth tries were a charm, the script ran all the way through both times.
I have seen complaints about them having too much downtime, but I personally have not witnessed this at all except for the one time they rebooted their server. Normally, the reboot wouldn’t have been a problem since it resulted in less than a minute of down time, but was an inconvenience because it terminated my process. I don’t normally post affiliate links, but I will this time because I’ve been so impressed by their price and service.
If you sign up for Dreamhost, either use my affiliate link or enter promo code YALD for $10 off any package. The affiliate credit will support my open source projects. If you don’t want to give me any credit for whatever reason, you can use this link.
