DreamHost.com, Screwing Up with a Smile
It was only a matter of time before the right DreamHost.com Blog post came along to really represent my years-long dissatisfaction with DreamHost.com service. The title of that post is “Site slowdowns for some customers.” The last significant line in this post is “It’s now been fixed and we’re working on resolving the issue permanently.”
It goes without saying that the problem came back in just a few days after this post. It will probably happen again and again without a clearly-defined, Blog-posted end in site. So while I await “enlightenment” from those who are willing to explain to a guy like me exactly what’s happening, this is my blurry model of what the in Hades the jolly crew of squid-billy elves at DreamHost.com are doing:
- About a year ago DreamHost.com moved into a new datacenter. This allowed them to dramatically increase the density of users per whatever measure you can name. From my end, this meant that 88% to 90% uptime (with incredibly fast speed) was replaced with 95% to 98% uptime (with incredibly slow speed).
- Moving to this new datacenter came with new conceptual/physical separation of database servers and web servers. Previously, a DreamHost.com database connection was (to me) just as fast as a DreamHost.com web server connection. Now that “we” are in the new datacenter, “my” database server is far the more slower than “my” web server.
- There are two responses to this ‘tier change’ between database servers and web servers: I swapped out MySQL dependency with SQLite dependency for SonghaySystem.com and I put myself of the waiting list for a “Private Server.” It goes without saying that switching to SQLite from MySQL did not improve performance—this is still a mystery to me!
- DreamHost.com has suffered massive denial of service attacks. It would not surprise me to find out in the DreamHost.com tell-all book ten years from now that these attacks came from agents working for large telecommunications companies. They are too busy putting out these fires to actually, seriously improve service.
- The Account Tests page in the DreamHost.com panel is just a way to ‘reboot’ my virtual server (or do some similar relatively simplistic and violent thing) to get my Web sites working again. I am certain they are not finished working on this “self support” tool as it provides no information.
- DreamHost.com reserves “the right” to provide a grey area for its shared hosting where “the good people of DreamHost.com” get the best shared hosting, while my sites get the shit. Without surveying the testimony of various customers you don’t really know whether equal treatment is taking place. This ability to use computing power to abuse customers in a refined manner is just a fact of the changing times and is not peculiar to “the good people of DreamHost.com.” The next time you go to your computer-controlled gas pump, just think of this…
Today, I am still convinced that DreamHost.com is a great hosting service. My Blog post about their Blog posts is just the price businesses pay for exposing themselves online. I prefer this openness over the old-school pretension of hiding behind mass media marketing (propaganda). I actually preferred DreamHost.com over GoDaddy.com because these guys hardly ever speak to their customers outside of patronizing generalizations and, the last time I checked, they have no Linux shell accounts—however, I am certain that GoDaddy.com uptime is superior to DreamHost.com uptime.
To me, when you are jolly and jovial, it is because you are a supreme master of your work. It this assumption that makes the cute and fuzzy character of DreamHost.com so irritating to me—and what is even more irritating is when they interpret my irritation as my inability to be or know “happiness” instead of being a little less reckless and assume the obvious: happiness means you moved to the new datacenter and your shit works fast at 99.9%.