Rourke on Technology

Dreammhost is a great value as long as you know what you’re buying. For less than six dollars a month you get a fully-featured shared hosting account with extremely generous storage and bandwith limits. Understand, though, that you are not getting a fast or reliable web host.

THE GOOD: Dreamhost accounts have every feature you could imagine. FTP, SSH, and secure email are all supported. The latest versions of Perl, PHP, MySQL, and Python are there, as you’d expect. Ruby on Rails is also available and fully suported. Beyond the above, expected feature, Dreamhost also offers Subversion repositories, streaming media servers, Jabber servers, and more.

Dreamhost accounts also sport one click installers for many of the poplar web based software packages out there, including Wordpress, Drupal, MediaWiki, and Joomla, to name only a few.

Beyond making these software packages and tools available, Dreamhost machines are set up intelligently. By default, web exposed scripts run as your user, rather than as www or nobody. The login shell is bash and there’s a decent rc file and prompt already set up. All the standard tools are installed on your account so editing files, checking mail and other reasonable activities are all very natural. I never needed to contact support to get things to work. Playing with new web technology and tools on Dreamhost proved to be easier than playing with the same packages on my own laptop.

THE BAD: Dreamhost had major issues with their sharing hosting service during the first few months I was a customer. Outages were long and often, and when the service was up it was very slow. Things have improved dramatically since then, but Dreamhost remains a relatively slow and unreliable service. Customer service has indicated that the current level of service is considered “normal” and it seems Dreamhost is simply a low-end offering with high user to shared server ratio.

According to Websitepulse.com, my Dreamhost server (warhead.dreamhost.com) was up 96.4% of the time — which means it was down nearly 22 hours in that period. Average HTTP response time was 4.4 seconds for the main Wordpress-backed page (using WP-Cache), but even this slow response time was not stable or predictable. As the graphs below show, there were definite spikes during which response time was noticeably worse. My site often took over thirty seconds to load and during these high-load periods the Wordpress admin interface was unusable.

SUMMARY: Dreamhost is a great value if speed and reliability aren’t an issue. The accounts are feature rich and offer very generous disk space and bandwith. If you prepay for two years and use one of the widely available (try Google) discount codes, you could easily have hosting for less than $6/month. If you’re worried about page load time, Dreamhost’s performance will likely be the deal breaker.

Below are some representative performance graphs from April. Click any image to see a larger version.