intuitive engineering

I moved off of hostgator.com last week on Labor Day. I chose dreamhost.com as the next hosting facility. I’m really going to try and stay for at least a year in one facility, even though moving only takes a couple of hours now, plus time for DNS to point to the new nameservers.

Dreamhost has a single plan, to which you can add. So we start with the basic plan for one year ($9.95/month, plus a wordpress discount, roughly $110), add two single IPs (not guaranteed to stay the SAME ip, but configured as unique to the site, $3.95/month for a year, roughly $44 each per year), configure SSL (no charge). And I have exactly what I would hope to have. At a cost of $198/year. $16.50/month. That’s a bit more than I would have hoped, but workable.

hostgator would have charged either $28.95/month (one reseller hosting plan, plus two ip addresses at $2/month each, and that doesn’t count the two SSL certs at $10/each install fee…), or $23.90/month (two separate accounts, $9.95/each, plus IP for each, $2/month…), to achieve this.

hostgator technical support was much more formal, and with the Live Chat feature, very responsive. At least they were up until I refused to solve a problem by upgrading my plan. They were constrained by marketing and administrative limits, but technically not bad.

dreamhost’s support ticketing system really doesn’t ticket. It assigns a number to each individual communication to support rather than gathering them into a single issue. I don’t like it. For me as a user, it is too informal, too easy to fail to get a quick communication response back. It may do some grouping that users can’t see internally, not sure.

The first night in the facility the (new) server I was on ran out of root filesystem space and needed to be rebooted to reconfigure space and resolve. This caused issues with WordPress from the admin point of view, but except for downtime during the reboot was likely invisible to traffic to the site.

When dougmunsinger.com was moved to an individual IP address, the apache config was missed and I got the “It works!” default apache testing page – five minutes after sending in a support request it was corrected. But there was no communication back from support on this issue, they just fixed it.

My overall impression is the support guys are linux-oriented, they run Debian Etch as the current version, and if the site stays accessible, reasonably fast and accumulates uptime, I can live with this situation. I am currently having an argument with support over some settings in apache that I believe are non-optimum. Discussion might be more accurate. Not critical, I have at least a temporary workaround in place, but, the server is tuned incorrectly at a default setting… IMHO.

I am watching my domain registrar in France, though – they have been Beta-testing a xen hosting solution, which if it pans out and remains reasonable in cost, would give me full control over the (virtual)s server, and that, frankly, would be ideal.

In the support form for submission to dreamhost.com, there is a drop down to indicate your expertise level as a user:

• “Please explain everything to me very carefully”
• “I do know some stuff but please don’t assume too much”
• “Overall I know my stuff, but I’m a little shaky in this area”
• “I have a good understanding of this stuff”
• “Not to be rude, but I probably know more about this than you”

That last is most likely to be true at the first level and even second level support people reading the support message from me. I don’t necessarily think it would be true at third level support – there should be testing data, network data, tcpdump, etc., traffic monitoring, OS configuration data, behavior on the hardware they run on, knowledge of the network design – all of that argues that at third level I do not know more than they do about their OS and system behaviors.

Having root on the server, even a virtual server, and better control of the whole setup would be more comfortable for me than blind user land. We’ll see where the beta testing at Gandi goes…

— dsm

Tags: apache, linux, web hosting