DreamHost.com is fired!

Here is a very powerful line from my poetry:

You are not the teacher to teach me the lesson of what it means to be an insignificant person.

This line is my preemptive response to the world of proud, arrogant minions who cannot control the impulse to inform me just how many customers DreamHost.com has and how ‘insignificant’ it is for me to ‘fire’ them. It seems that these proud and “sweet” people would tell me this with an implication that I, my ego, am somehow unaware of the actual numbers involved. What this effort tells me is that the person playing Pollyanna does not know how liberation works—because the right to demand excellence and true human freedom as a manifestation of divine creation starts with each of us—one person at a time. This one person has evaluated DreamHost.com and these are my findings:

Their Private Server feature for databases was released prematurely.

You may have noticed that this wonderful, awe inspiring Blog was “down” recently. The database providing all data for this WordPress Blog was placed within a virtual private server that crashes at will. This is what DreamHost.com says about this feature:

My apologies again for the problems and so much downtime, I’ve emailed the admins to check when the “restart your mysql ps” feature will be in the control panel, and other fixes and monitoring to help prevent such long downtimes. I’ve credited your account $20 for a month of hosting for all the downtime. I’ve restarted the mysql ps and it is running fine now. If you have further problems let me know.

Thanks!

Justin

It is important to understand that this “restart your mysql ps” feature is basically telling me that my Blog can go down at will by design and the onus is on me to reboot my “ps” when I discover a problem. What happens when I’m off snowboarding? I can’t depend on DreamHost.com to catch the problem—especially on the weekend.

My Blog went “down” twice in the last few days. The first time it went down it took about 15 hours for them to respond. That was my fault. It was because I failed to load the proper humor module to read these jolly support options properly:

The second time my Blog went down, it was pure DreamHost.com incompetence. It took over 15 hours for someone to respond—even when the correct jolly support option was selected.

So the Private Server ‘stuff’ at DreamHost.com will certainly be working properly in a few dozen months—but not at my expense. The reason why I am trying this new feature in the first place is because of the slowness issues posted earlier. And the punch line to this jolly experience is that the private servers don’t improve bandwidth!

DreamHost.com has no in-house tier above shared hosting.

As of this writing, when DreamHost.com wants to roll out the red carpet and sell you a “dedicated” server, it refers you to Hosting.com. What this tells me (now) is that DreamHost.com ‘specializes’ in shared hosting “solutions”—which means they really don’t have the resources to handle advanced (professional) hosting scenarios. So the service I have been paying for since December 2003 is the best they can do. Maybe next week something wonderful will happen but I leave that happiness for the existing DreamHost.com customers.

What about Amazon’s EC2 service?

Leaving behind the flock of thousands crammed into the “shared” hosting environment can take you to the other extreme just short of plopping down your own server in a “state of the art” datacenter: a virtual server that is essentially a blank slate. It took a while for me to get it but that is essentially what Amazon’s EC2 service is. When AG noticed that the kintespace.com Blog was down he mentioned this service to me…

The proprietary part of the service is the virtual machine file/data format Amazon.com uses, an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). My assumption is that VMware will come out with a utility to allow us to convert VMware files into AMI files. In the mean time, this option requires too many Linux skills from a guy who can barely get XAMPP running. My concern is setting up a box from scratch only to have it hacked because of my lack of Linux security configuration experience.

After this DreamHost.com episode goes away and divine stability returns, the courage to experiment with naked Linux boxes should be available to me.

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