Well, I made it to the other side. That new car smell on this site comes complimentary with Media Temple’s new grid server hosting platform. Yes, I know, this new site doesn’t look that much different from the old one, but trust me, it comes with 10x less headaches then the last one. and one of these days i’ll finally get around to the chocolate-minimalist redesign i’ve had on the back burner for months. I can feel my blood yearning for late night coding sessions.
Well, here’s the dreamhost story in a nutshell. In one way or another they have been my hosting service for over 10 years. For the past 4 years or so, I’ve had at least 4 different domains running and most sites that i’ve built from the ground up have been hosted on dreamhost. The one thing that I always hated was their account management tool called the “dream host control panel” or “web admin panel”, seems they can’t figure out quite what to call it, i just call it ‘ugly’. It hasn’t changed much in ten years (!) and is ridiculously convoluted. web panel aside, you just can’t beat dreamhost’s prices. they are cheap for sure.
About six months ago I started receiving heavy spam on my wordpress installs on both my site and my sister’s. spam bots were attacking the comments and the contact form. I installed akismet to fight the comment spam.
A month or so ago I started receiving automated mails from Dreamhost tech support saying that my user id was being throttled down because of too much mail being sent by that id, further, my id would be disabled if I didn’t stop sending so much mail. and they suggested that it was probably spam bots hitting a contact form on my site. I researched the problems other wordpress users were having and stumbled upon Bad Behavior, installed it and that seemed to be catching at least 100 attempts a day. I kept on receiving various emails from Dreamhost telling me to stop the high usage. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. 4 days ago I received an email telling me they had disabled my user id.
Admittedly, I probably could have done a bunch of things to prevent the high usage, least of which was pulling the contact forms altogether. For that part, I accept my culpability.
The way Dreamhosts’s service works is that you get one central id and anything created with that id is affected. All the sites I host and the url registrations I create with Dreamhost all fall under the same id. With the disabling of my user id, one by one all of the sites I was hosting went down. I emailed tech support again to ask for them to re-enable the user so that i could pull the contact forms and really figure out how to manage the situation. I snarkly gave them 2 hours to answer my email before I pulled my accounts. what can i say?! i was pissed.
I didn’t hear back from tech support for a full day and a half and you can bet i sent more then one email. “what about the tech support phone number, Ed?” Dreamhost don’t have a phone number to call, how convenient. By the time I heard from tech support my decision was already made. I signed up for Media Temple’s service and started the arduous process of transferring over 8 url registrations and 4 hosted domains.
i didn’t make this decision because I was pissed. I made this decision because I was sad. I loved Dreamhost. or at least I felt they were like the underdog and deserved my support. But after such a big fuck up by their tech support department, there was no way i could stay. I’m not running ecommerce sites or even sites that get more then a few hundred unique visitors a day, but for my hosting service to pull down my sites for 2 days and then not answer my emails is just redonkulous.
Well, so far the transition has gone pretty smoothly except for a few hiccups in learning Media Temple’s beautifully designed ‘account center’, which were remedied by calls to the tech support phone number (can I get an ‘amen’?!). I guess in the end, you get what you pay for. We’ll see if it was worth all the hassle…
