Company-sucks.com Gone Wrong: Dreamhost-Sucks.com
Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 8:28 amSometimes I do actually wish there was a law preventing Company-sucks.com style websites. In this case, I’m speaking about Dreamhost-Sucks.com, a website that spews multiple false statements, has poorly written posts, and other poorly thought out ideas.
- They state that the Better Buisness Bureau is a government ran organization: this is false. The BBB is a company, and is not associated with any government department. The BBB does not exist to assist consumers in getting complaints resolved, but only exists to assist BBB members to bash non-BBB members.The BBB does not allow non-BBB members to close complaints, and allows anyone to make a compliant, even if they are unfounded, or impossible. If the non-BBB member resolves the matter, the BBB does not close the complaint. BBB membership is expensive, and most companies do not belong to the BBB.Dreamhost’s so-called ‘F’ rating is due to their refusal to belong to fraudulant organization such as the BBB, and I fully support their decision.
- They state that customers are unable to host forums or blogs due to CPU utalization: this is false. I currently use Wordpress and Gallery2 as my website, and they are not easy on the CPU by any means. However, they are not as bad as the next thing on my list…
- They state that Dreamhost will not host phpBB: if this is true, and I have not verified this, I do not blame them. phpBB is bloated, badly written, a pain in the ass to maintain. Update: Apparently this is totally unfounded, phpBB is available from Dreamhost’s One-Click Install system, right next to Wordpress and Gallery2.
- They state that Dreamhost is ‘too good to be true’, and you get what you pay for: I hate to say this, but Dreamhost is not cheap. $9.95 a month (with a $50 setup fee if you don’t pre-order a year) for a mere 20GB storage and 1TB a month bandwidth is not cheap, there are many hosting providers who quote even bigger numbers for lower prices. Dreamhost, from what I’ve seen, is in the middle of the road for prices, and closer to the top for features and performance.
- They state that Dreamhost is constantly down: Yet again, false. Over the past few months I’ve had only one downtime, which was for around an hour while they were doing maintaince on a wonky router. Dreamhost exceeds my requirements to be called reliable, and they approach of not exceed 99.999% reliablity.
- They state that Dreamhost does not answer tech support emails: Yet again, false. Since things rarely go wrong on Dreamhost, I’ve only had to request support once, and it was quickly answered and taken care of. I wish all companies were that fast.
- They state that Dreamhost has hidden CPU limitations: False. Dreamhost’s policy is that only the worst abusers get punished, and even then they seek to help correct the problem before disabling an account. CPU time statistics are not available, but then again, they shouldn’t be if you aren’t paying by the minute.
- They state that Dreamhost disables accounts without warning. False. Unless you’ve done something really really really wrong, such as upload warez, or any other undesirable material, Dreamhost always tries to work with the customer before disabling accounts.
- They state that Dreamhost unfairly bans abusive users who swear and threaten on their forums and blogs: Guess what, this one is totally true. You act stupid, you get your ass kicked. I’m not seeing a problem here.
- They state that Dreamhost unfairly holds you to your contract: Another true one. If you make a one or two year pre-paid contract with Dreamhost, by law, they can hold you to that contract. By ending your account with Dreamhost, they have a right to consider that as a breach of contract and keep your money. Yet again, I’m not seeing a problem here.
- The final one: This website was started in February of 2006, and only has postings for Februrary and April. It is now September. Did some teenager forget about his project? Or did some rival hosting company think better of it?
So, I don’t know why anyone would go and do this if they didn’t have some sort of alterior motive. I put people like this in the same category as people who say Apple products suck, or that President Bush is the best President ever in US history: complete whackos who are several fries short of a Happy Meal.
Haha, well said.
I’m in complete agreement here. Although, I do have to make a correction or two if you wouldn’t mind too too terribly.
DH has had a fair bit of downtime the last month, though it hasn’t effected me personally–their status page, riddled as it is with comments flaming Dreamhost, says as much as does the few blogs hosted by Dreamhost that I frequently read having been down as recently as last Friday (note: not 9/15/2006).
Apparently, as fake as it is, the BBB has upgraded DH to a C, now.
They do tend to take a while to answer support requests, but that’s largely dependant on how busy they are and whether or not it’s the weekend. Frankly, the way certain people complain I wouldn’t answer them on weekends either.
I hosted a PHPBB forum before, though admitedly not for long, and it ran just fine on the DH server.
There’s probably more, but I just find that site highly amusing. What’s more, I think whoever owns that site still uses DH. Why else would it get a special mention every time someone gets irritated with something not working right as soon as they snap their fingers? And it’s always by the same people…
Haha, well said.
I love my Dreamhost account.
1. Agreed
2. I believe the CPU restrictions were removed anyways.
3. You should blame them if they do not host phpBB… this statement shows complete bias… And yes it is a one click install, but your previous comment questions your credibility when you think such a simple script can’t be run on your hosting…
4. List them… DreamHost is one of the best prices out there if not the best since it grows each week… And it kind of is too good to be true because if everybody used that much, they would be in debt. But while DreamHost is very cheap, you can’t charge people for month of hosting and only give them 90% hosting for the month…
5. TRUE, I suggest you start keeping track of your site with GIGRIB at http://ipwalk.com/ - You can see my site has had some bad uptime this month: http://uptime.ipwalk.com/site/month_summary/site_name/mindpoop.com
and my other sites too: http://uptime.ipwalk.com/site/month_summary/site_name/MyDallasCounty.Com
wow, one of them has less than 90% http://uptime.ipwalk.com/site/month_summary/site_name/NorthGarland.Net
6. They have been pretty fast in the past, but right now they seem to be busy with all of their issues…
7. Again, I think they disabled CPU limitations, but they do state they will contact you about it first. Although contacting you won’t help when the reason you have high CPU rates is because your site is actually getting enough visitors to start using the 1TB of bandwidth you were given…
8. “They state that Dreamhost disables accounts with warning.” Yeah, they warn you… I am guessing that is a typo…
9. Agreed.
10. This is usually as a result of DreamHost not holding up the HOSTING end of the deal… right now I do not have any sympathy for DreamHost trying to hold up a hosting contract when they are FAILING to host sites… At least back in July or whenever when the heat wave swept through, it was not DreamHost’s fault or problem, but now, it IS, and they need to get somebody in there who CAN help them if they can’t figure out why they are having complete network failures…
11. Sadly the site still makes its point…
You would have a better understanding if your server was affected. While it is still not right to make a site to bash one that for the most part is doing well, it is good in the sense that DreamHost should be worried about getting their name tarnished… I have 20 days left to decide if I want to renew my hosting account, but downtime only seems to be getting worse… so can you really blame me if I am upset that my hosting company does not do its job?
James, the boxes that have been mentioned as being down on their status site have not effected me whatsoever, none of my services are on them, so only the recent router maintence has really effected me, and even then for a short time.
Justin, Yeah, thats a typo. Once again, I need to proof-read better.
As for #4, I’d rather not. I don’t advertise other companies that I either do not use their services, or I do not have an advertisement agreement with. If someone else wants to list some as a comment, I’d be glad to moderate that comment in.
Also, for disabling websites, yeah, if I’m going waaaaay over my bandwidth for the month, then sure, they’ll probably disable my website before asking as a favor, instead of just letting it run wild and I have to pay the extra bandwidth fees (which are a tad on the expensive side), then again, if you’re going over 1TB, use one of Dreamhost’s better plans, your viewership should be able to pay for that via ads and provided services and whatnot.
And I didn’t notice they used DH, thats almost retarded. I wouldn’t complain if they decided to, eh, make DH Sucks go away.
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I started with DH back in 2004, I think. Either way I have been with them for a long time and have had NO trouble what’s so ever. I now have over 400 gigs of space available with them so far and 7 domains hosted on just one account. Each time they give away a new deal to new clients they also upgrade their existing clients. I like that.
Granted none of my sites are getting slash-dotted or anything but I am still VERY happy with the service and support a have received in the last 3 years. Long live DH.
For the most part if Dreamhost feels you are unfairly using their service they ask you to resolve the problem.
I had filled up my mySQL database to well over 50GBs just screwing around and got a very professional e-mail asking what was going on and that 50GBs on the mySQL server was unreasonable.
I had plenty of time to copy the stuff off the mySQL server and no harm was done (I even just stored it all as a flat file and they didn’t care).
I have no gripe over Dreamhost’s service…
I have had great success with DreamHost! It has not let me down a single time!
I once made a 3rd party picture section for Digg (digpicz.com, (see also reddit pics :)), and the shared hosting for $9.95 a month handled 100′000 (hundred thousand!!!) visitors the first day!
I blogged what I optimized to handle such a traffic on a cheap shared host in this post: A few words about Digpicz.com.