2-webhosting.com

Dreamhost have the best features I’ve found for affordable shared hosting : basically they offer all the features competitors have, PLUS you get SSH access and SVN repositories. Cheap (around $8 a month, depending on your payment), full featured (unparred from what I’ve seen). Dream host ? Almost.

Their uptime is the problem that will make me leave them eventually. 2 or 3 times a week my monitoring system warns me about server being down for a couple of minutes or sometimes a couple of hours.

If uptime is critical to you, either because your adsense earnings or your ego cannot stand one hour offline, I would not recommend them. The only reason I’m staying there is because I value more SSH & SVN over those relatively minor outages.

I currently use DreamHost to host two sites with one of them being registered there as well. The larger of the two sites has been there since 1999, serves approx. 4,000 pages per day (not counting the faviocon, robots, and the like) and has an announcement list of approx. 1,000 users who subscribed using a (DreamHost provided) automated system. I have also used DreamHost in the past to host a site for a blogger-run-blog when I had the time to post.

The web hosting aspect is easy to use with standard ftp or secure-ftp access. The management of the various other things (changing billing options, checking user statistics, web-mail, forwarding/redirecting e-mail, and setting up e-mail subscription lists) is very user friendly. The team running it always has a sense of humor in their blog and newsletter — but doesn’t let that get in the way of getting the job done.

I have contacted them over a dozen times in the past with questions on topics such as transferring domains and the use of mailing lists and have gotten helpful responses within 24 hours to each one, often much quicker. (They also have a support wiki that answers a lot of standard questions).

I had a recent (my fault, I left a door open type) of security breach and they responded to my e-mail that day and followed up again the next.

The most negative publicity they have received is that recently they had a billing error where customers who were using automatic billing on their credit or debit cards were billed in advance. They caught the error, put a notice up about it on the status page, set about reversing the charges (e-mailing each person when their charges were reversed), and explained the entire situation on their blog.

I have used DreamHost to host my hobby site for years. Generally the support is great and I have not had any downtime in the last 9 months. When there are problems, they provide you with an RSS feed to let you know the cause and estimated time for a fix.

They also set up almost everything for a google hosted email and business solution. 50 mailboxes with 6GB each of space and growing.

Just today I received an email with Dreamhost promo code ROCKET ($50 discount on any hosting plan + 3 free domain names) and five platinum (one use only) DreamHost invitations:

106795140537
389689468344
699392776112
782423249306
910190325914

They each Dreamhost invitation code give the redeemer four (4) times the normal disk and bandwidth which means $9.95/mo for 1000GB space and 20TB (yes terabytes) of transfer. You can’t go wrong with this amount for the price.

If you sign up for longer, you get an additional $150 off the bill for the five year plan and $200 off the bill for the ten year plan.

Hi, we’re setting up a wordpress blog for our church that will include audio mp3 streams of our weekly services. The site will have relatively little traffic ( < 500 unique visitors, < 5000 page views/mo), and an even smaller percentage of that accessing the audio streams.

So my questions were, a) is audio mp3 streaming CPU intensive, and b) with our projected traffic, will there be a CPU issue running on a shared server?