jarango

Dreamhost: should I switch?

I’ve been hosting my sites with Dreamhost since 2004, when my prior hosting provider suffered an infrastructure meltdown (and subsequently fumbled over the response). I’ve been a happy Dreamhost customer, for the most part.

However, over the past year or so there been small incidents that have made me question my commitment to DH as a hosting provider. There have been site outages, email outages, a control panel “upgrade” that feels clumsier than its predecessor, and most recently a major security breach that sent me scrambling to reset passwords.

Two things have kept me from moving to another provider:

1. Inertia – I have lots of stuff on DH, and migrating away is going to take more time and effort than I can muster at the moment.
2. Transparency – Even though DH’s service has been less than stellar as of late, they’ve consistently been very transparent about communicating with us clients about the issues. Here’s a good example. This frankness is refreshing, and very different from my experience with other providers.

That said, I’m still on the fence about whether or not to switch. I’m particularly worried about Dreamhost’s mail servers’ performance; one of the options I’m exploring is switching only our mail service. (Possibly to Google Apps.)

If you have any recommendations or thoughts on these issues, please drop me a line.

June 13, 2007 | Archived in Site History