I recently got the following email:
I googled “dreamhost sucks” and found your blog. I really hate this company. I have a small business and they somehow managed to create a second account for my company in spite of the fact that we never requested one. Then they emailed us that we owed more money on our account and shut off our access and emails due to the amount overdue. After months of various DH staffers replying to my emails (we hadn’t ever selected phone support so they would only correspond via email) the problems were finally passed to a “supervisor”. The supervisor promptly cancelled the duplicate account and reset our live and fully paid account so that we could use it again. This took months of frustration and provision of the same information to the different DH staffers. There is obviously no communications within their staff there. Very frustrating.Today, they sent an email to me requesting an additional albeit minor sum of $9.95 for a temporary account that was created when nobody at my company could access our account. They insist we created it and pay for it or they’ll suspend our live account. I complained and asked for the same supervisor that resolved DH’s past errors, and the staffer, Jay H, promptly cancelled our fully paid, live account, and told me we still had to pay for this temporary account created by a DH staffer when we didn’t even have access to our site and emails due to DH’s original errors!!So frustrating. I’m now looking for a new domain and web host company, with excellent customer service and professionalism. DH doesn’t take responsibility for their own errors and seems to dream up ways to charge clients extra money for stuff they never requested. Outside of the online world, this would be called extortion.Feel free to post. I hate Dreamhost!
As do I. I wish I had left the second I discovered they hadn’t backed up my site, after saying they had. (They had backed up only a small fraction of it.) After that, my sites kept getting hacked. First, we moved this blog and www.sethroberts.net off Dreamhost. They stopped getting hacked. Then the Shangri-La Diet forums got hacked. We moved them off Dreamhost. No more hacking. The cost of even one incident of hacking is far more than you will ever save from their low rates.Dreamhost hacked — and see the comments.
For what it’s worth, I’ve hosted all my sites on DreamHost for the last five years. I have not had any significant amount of trouble with the company.
Use Rackspace Cloud. It’s not expensive. My pathetic affiliate link: https://www.rackspacecloud.com/550.html
I’ve used them for a few years now. I’ve needed their support people on a few occasions and they are always available, super helpful, and know what they are doing.
One time I thought some service I was using might down over an account issue. The support person’s response? We never do that.
I am on the extremely cheap and competent cyberultra, have never had a problem with them.
They don’t do backups, or indeed anything, other than simply work.
Going through my logs, it looks as if someone has been attempting to guess my passwords, making tens of thousands of failed guesses, and Cyberultra made no attempt to filter them out. However, since my passwords are unguessable, this was no problem for me.
The usual attack is to socially engineer password recovery services. If anyone has been trying that on cyber ultra, they have failed.
https://www.000webhost.com/directory/reviews/cyberultra.net
A recommendation for A2Hosting:
https://calnewport.com/blog/2012/04/29/walking-in-merlin-manns-footsteps-and-a-book-you-should-know-about/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StudyHacks+%28Study+Hacks%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
“When I first started blogging in 2007, I needed web hosting. I noticed that Merlin Mann had a note on 43 Folders about his happiness working with a company named A2 Hosting. That was good enough for me: I signed up for their introductory package.
That was five years ago and I’ve been nothing but happy with their service ever since.”