It always feels nice when you see a decision pay off in a positive way. For me this is especially nice as I seem to find things out the hard way most of the time.
In this case I am referring to a hosting provider I decided NOT to choose. That host is DreamHost. I had done a lot of research on DreamHost and was sure I would go with them when the time can except for chance stumble upon a blog post describing many performance and uptime problems the blogger had experienced with DreamHost. After some debating with myself I decided to look for a different host. That’s how I found HostGator which I am very pleased with thus far.
So on to the point. DreamHost announced via their offical blog that they are encouraging their customers to use GMail instead of the email provided by DreamHost with the customer’s hosting package. Why? According to DreamHost:
Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.
And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features.
They want to offload their customer service problems to Google and apparently nobody cares about email when choosing a host. Well, perhaps, that’s because when we choose to pay you for an advertised service we except it to just work and be rock solid. I am not going to contact your sales department and ask for email stats and uptime charts. I expect that it is the best it can possible be.
On the positive side Google probably provides a much more reliable service than DreamHost and Google does it for free. You can even use you@yourdomain.com if you use Google Apps (also free).
I am just glad I stayed clear of DreamHost. What service will they try and drop next?
As a side note I was very surprised at the tone of their blog. It is incredibly unprofessional and I would expect it was written by a nerdy high school student. Here are some quotes.
Some people might say Web Hosting is for late night orgies in the data center.
Me + Web Browser = Instant Orgy (tool tip on image of woman wearing a Firefox tank)
see you emo fags later - tom
To me this is a huge warning sign as to the way the company is run. There is no way I would ever even consider using DreamHost again.
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June 8th, 2008 at 9:57 am
I just stumbled upon this post whilst reading a bit through your blog & just wanted to leave a comment since I’ve been with Dreamhost for a couple of years.
When I signed up, I read all the nightmare scenarios about outages, etc, but that still has to happen to me (to be fair, that was the year before I joined & from what I know, they changed datacentre since & did lots of changes to their infrastructure).
I haven’t found many hosts that can compete on price & their support is great: I had to contact them a few times with high priority things & they always got back within 5 minutes (whether day or night).
They also offer lots of goodies like svn, wordpress, drupal, joomla, phpbb, etc as one -click installers & allow you to use shell to log into your account, which at least in Britain is not a given!
I also think that having Google as you email host is a good thing since I’m pretty sure they have a better infrastructure to most hosts & that way you have 6GB per account that you don’t have to take away from your hosting.
I know their newsletter & blog posts come across as childish quite often, but their support is not & they are very helpful when you have questions about things (i.e. they helped me understand .htaccess, etc).
Sorry, I don’t want to come across as a fan boy (which I’m not: show me a better deal and I leave :-), just wanted to let people know that there are a lot of good things as well about dreamhost.
June 15th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
“Some people might say Web Hosting is for late night orgies in the data center.” - is that for real??? I am sure you’ve made a smart choice by staying away from this company.
Btw, we are using google mail for business (@ourdomainname.com), and it works great, never had any problems with it. In addition, you can share google documents with users under your domain. And of course I love the interface (beats Outloook!)
June 15th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Yes that quote is for real. You can read the post on their blog http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/05/23/what-web-hosting-is-for/.
I agree that Google Apps is great and I setup my clients with it.