Dreamhost Uptime Numbers are TERRIBLE!

I don’t care what their marketing stats say, I have my own indepedent verification. I’ve been using Wormly for quite a while monitoring some of my demo sites, and other services that are part of Bayon and part of Dynamo. Since I was already paying for it, I figured I’d turn it loose on this blog (nicholasgoodman.com) and see what the uptime was like.

I always thought Dreamhost was a little skiddish, and my email box finds approximately one email per day with a failure, but i figured they were small, single request failures. Nope. The independent measuring of the uptime of this blog is a CRUDDY, CRAPPY, 97.6%.

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That’s pathetic! My blog is nothing special, an out of the box WordPress installation backed by their MySQL. I haven’t done any of my own installations, customizations (excepting a theme) and yet my blog uptime is awful. I’ve liked the dreamhost panel; it gives the “technical but uninterested in actually administering their own server” user a lot of power and I’d be willing to tolerate a little downtime (truthfully, anything above 99.5% is OK with me). But 97% uptime? Shyeah… Time to start looking.

Anyone have any suggestions for good WordPress / PHP / MySQL hosts? WIlling to pay top dollar and I’ll bring with me registrations for about 25 domains.

8 thoughts on “Dreamhost Uptime Numbers are TERRIBLE!

  1. Jeff

    If you are looking for shared hosting, I suggest Webfaction (www.webfaction.com). I had them for about 6 months and their service and uptime were top notch, and their prices aren’t bad either.

    If you are looking for something more self-hosted, and are considering a VPS, Linode is my current hosting option, since I wanted a bit more control over the bits, and wanted a full fledged server that I could develop on. So far their service and performance are great, and for only a few more dollars a month than what my Webfaction plan cost me.

    Reply
  2. Alex

    Having owned a web host in the late 90s I can tell you that shared hosting always gets the short end of the stick. 97-99% is about average for the industry in general for shared websites. If you are willing to pay top dollar, get one of amazon’s virtual servers. You’ll be much happier.

    Reply
  3. Sean

    I’ll put in my vote for WebFaction – http://www.webfaction too. I’ve been with these guys for over 3 years and I’ve had nothing but great service. I haven’t tested their actual uptime but I’ve only seen my site down once for about 1h in over 3 years.

    Reply
  4. Chris

    I can tell you that our site on dreamhost has been down just about everyday for a month. I don’t know how long the downtime is, but it seems to be internal server error 500 pretty much every time. I started writing to dreamhost support and it usually gets fixed quickly. However, I shouldn’t have to write them everyday. We have been with them for 4 years or so and have had enough. The downtime has just gotten worse. They moved us to a “faster server” a couple months ago and we went from a slow site to a down site. We have had enough and will not be renewing our subscription when it expires this year. Oh yeah I forgot to mention, when I write to their support about the site being down. I usually get the response, “there is no server wide problems”

    Reply
  5. Jeff

    Same problems here. I unfortunately have paid up for 8 more years. When I asked about a prorated refund when I go to another service, this was the response:

    “There was a load average spike on the machine. I was unable to determine
    the root cause of the spike. Out logs do not indicate that there is a
    user consuming more than their fair share of system resources. Sorry that
    I could not offer more insight. Our administrations team will continue to
    monitor the stability of the machine…

    With regards to a refund, they are only issues to accounts within the
    first 97 days of service. We value you as a customer and are more than
    willing to accommodate you. If the problems persists, we will gladly move
    your account to a more stable machine.”

    Reply
  6. Sheeri

    97.6% uptime for $100 per year seems like a pretty good deal to me. I manage some shared hosting accounts on Dreamhost, and it looks like you’re stuck on a host that keeps going down — you were down for a day in April, 1.5 days in May, over half a day each in Jun, Oct and Sept.

    Additionally, I’ve gotten maybe 8 e-mails in the past 3 years of managing some Dreamhost accounts, 3 were about passwords, and 5 related to migrating the account to a different machine.

    Why not just ask to be moved to a more stable machine? If that’s your problem, it can be resolved pretty easily that way, and they even suggest it.

    Reply
  7. Brad

    I just upgraded my dreamhost account to a PS. I checked my uptime report for 2 of my websites:

    “Uptime: 95.8%”

    I am moving to hostgator. I have had it with dreamhost.

    Reply

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