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Review of Dreamhost website hosting

There are a lot of site hosting options out there. I chose Dreamhost to host thinkPond.org and I'm pleased with my choice. First I'll list the features advertised by Dreamhost at the time of writing. Then I'll let you in on some things you wouldn't otherwise find out until you signed up.

I can confirm that you get all this stuff and it all seems to work.

The hardware

Dreamhost has several servers. When you sign up, you'll be assigned to one. Each server hosts a number of sites (I don't know how many) so you won't get exclusive access to your own server. The server I'm on has these specs.

Depending on how many sites it's serving, that pretty beefy. I've certainly never noticed mine being under any strain.

Messing around with the shell

Shell access is one feature that not all web hosts provide. Some only offer FTP access. For me this is a make or break feature. If it doesn't have shell access, I'm not interested! You can only log in with SSH. There is no telnet access for example. I have used the cygwin ssh client, the win32 Putty client and FileZilla to connect and they all worked fine. Once you log in, it's just a normal linux box like you might have at home. Except you don't get root access of course! You have complete control over the files in your home directory (all 200GB of them) and you can manipulate them using the usual unix commands (cp, mv, rm, etc) or you can use FTP.

Within your home directory, you'll find a sub-directory for your main domain (e.g. mysite.com) and a sub-directory for each subdomain (e.g. forum.mysite.com). You can create as many subdomains as you want. Just register them for free through the web control panel and a new sub-directory is created automatically and you can then copy in your content.

One thing that surprised me is the amount of flexibility Dreamhost offers. For example, you can compile your own binary programs with gcc and run them on the server no problem. In fact it is even possible to build programs on the server itself. The full gcc suite is installed and available (version 3.3.5).

Another thing that surprised me is you can install programs that open ports and then connect to them from the outside world. For example, as a test, I installed my own web server (Jetty) and had it listen on port 8080. I could connect to it from my browser at home!

However, I did find that any long running processes tended to die after 30 minutes to 1 hour. This may be Dreamhost's policy and it practically rules out long running processes. They do however support crontab, which can be set up to run a program at regular intervals.

One click installs

This is pretty awesome. Although you should have no problems installing a CMS on Dreamhost's servers, it saves some time to have someone do it for you. They will install MySQL databases, Joomla (1.0 or 1.5), Wordpress and phpBB among others. I used their one click install to set up a MySQL database and Joomla 1.0 for this site. It took about 10 minutes from clicking the button to having the software installed and ready to serve content. They send you an email when it's done explaining the final steps to configure each package.

Although I don't use either, I experimented using one click install for Wordpress and phpBB as well. They both worked.

Day to day operations

Once your site is up and running, there are certain things you'll want to do regularly. Most people like to check their site statistics every once in a while. Dreamhost provides the analog logfile analyzer for this purpose. It's not the most intuitive program in the world but it does the job. You get full access to your log files though so you could theoretically use any stats program you want.

The web control panel tells you how much storage you're using and how much bandwidth you've used recently.

If you don't like to check your mail with POP and SMTP, you can use Dreamhosts's web mail interface. They use SquirrelMail, which does the job.

Support

I haven't had to use their email support yet because nothing has gone wrong so I can't comment on the quality. I have used their support wiki several times. They have a lot of useful information, both general and specifically about Dreamhost. In fact you can read it before you sign up. I always like to read the manual before I buy something. They also have an active discussion board where you can ask questions. There seems to be a lot of knowledgable users willing to help out.

The $90 discount

Now the important part. You can save $90. It's a pretty good deal. If you pay 1 year up-front, that's $9.95 for 12 months or $119.40. Subtract the $90 discount and you've got a year of top quality hosting for $29.40.

How does it work? Dreamhost offers its members a $97 fee for every new member they refer. You can choose how it gets split. I have chosen to keep $7 leaving you with a saving of $90. That seems very fair I think. How do you get the $90? It's automatically discounted from your payment.

So if you decide you would like to sign up for Dreamhost, save yourself some money and make a contribution to this site by using the coupon code THINKPOND. Just copy and paste it into the discount code box when you sign up and you'll see the discount applied before you make payment.

Disclaimer

To the best of my knowledge, all of this information is correct at the time of writing (11/24/2006). I suggest you confirm any important features with Dreamhost before you sign-up.