Four stars…
Mostly good. Glitches are few and they are far between.
They are better by far than Hostgator. Hostgator squats on the https side of your domain, advertising on it. If you want that side of your domain clean, you have to pay them to stop by setting up https. Dreamhost does not, the access to https fails as it should.
The support is adequate. But. To communicate with support you open a ticket. To reply to that ticket you open another ticket within the web interface – there’s no provision to replay within a ticket, to update, or to escalate in any way. They usually respond within 3 hours, but I’ve seen a response take 17 hours.
The ticketing system is sometimes sending out an email acknowledgement and sometimes not. I think you can replay to the email and maybe get it included in the original ticket but I haven’t actually tested that.
I’ve been with them four years. I’m not intending to move somewhere else as yet.
I spent seven hours yesterday down because I deleted a unique IP address I didn’t need and had accidentally set up through the web interface domain management section, and that I thought I had already deleted. The DNS for the removed IP address persisted… And persisted… And persisted…
I checked locally on the server on which I was hosting.
[dsm@muffy dougmunsinger.com] $ nslookup dougmunsinger.com Server: 66.33.216.208 Address: 66.33.216.208#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: dougmunsinger.com Address: 67.205.50.249 [dsm@muffy dougmunsinger.com] $ nslookup 67.205.50.249 Server: 66.33.216.208 Address: 66.33.216.208#53 Non-authoritative answer: 249.50.205.67.in-addr.arpa name = dougmunsinger.com. The specific and individual IP is still in place. Also - this is on the dreamhost server schultz, so propagation of the DNS change is not an issue. Contrast this with a non-specific ip result: [dsm@muffy dougmunsinger.com] $ nslookup myappportfolio.com Server: 66.33.216.208 Address: 66.33.216.208#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: myappportfolio.com Address: 69.163.143.189 [dsm@muffy dougmunsinger.com] $ nslookup 69.163.143.189 Server: 66.33.216.208 Address: 66.33.216.208#53 Non-authoritative answer: 189.143.163.69.in-addr.arpa name = apache2-yelp.schultz.dreamhost.com.
Eventually the site came back, about 7 PM that evening. I received a reply this morning at 6:17 AM, saying all looked to be good and the caching DNS looks to have cleared.
Like I said, mostly good.
—doug