Ok, going by some of the recommendations on this site I had a closer look at Dreamhost and decided to pony up the cash for a Level3 account (Code Monster). It's about $20/month if you prepay a year and coupons on the net were easy to find, so I saved an additional $97.

They also have a 97-day satisfaction guarantee which hopefully I won't have to use. I'm pretty sure the site will be sufficient for my immediate needs though I'm sure the 60GB storage space won't be for the longer term (one of the projects I'm working on is going to suck up a lot of server storage).

Anyone have any esperience using the shopping cart software on this site? After my research into merchant accounts I plan to go the PayPal Merchant route for now and likely upgrade to our own merchant account with a local company later in the year (it just doesn't make sense to do that right now). Because of this I'm not positive I even need SSL as transactions go out to PayPal's own site for billing info. SSL will otherwise require a dedicated IP (right?) which will add about $4/month to the bill on Dreamhost.

I hope to be serving product downloads from this site as early as some time next month and I don't imagine the file for the first project will be over 10MB compressed. 1.6TB/month should be more than enough here (i'd be extremely happy if it weren't of course! )

Anyway, I went this route as I didn't think I'd be making full use of a dedicated server at this time. I can always move everything over toward the end of the year if I need the extra versatility.

Bruno

I'm still happy with Dreamhost, though my needs are probably more meager than what you see yours growing into. I use my Level 1 (el cheapo) Dreamhost account for:

Hosting (lrcdb.org, tonyc.org, and a few subdomains for gallery, development of lrcdb, etc.)
Email (five low-volume email accounts)
MySQL (the lrcdb, gallery databases)
Network backup (using rdiff-backup nightly)
Subversion (three small repositories)

My monthly bandwidth tops out at less than 500mb/month, disk usage now is at 4.5Gb, most of which is my rdiff-backup of my server at home.

For these purposes, it's been great so far.

Well the more I look at what they offer (and what others offer) the better I feel about the choice. They also offer Miva as a comerce solution (store interface, inventory, etc..) - it sounds like a pretty good package and has PayPal support which I'll need right away and native Moneris support for the future (seemingly one of the bettter merchant account suppliers I've found and co-owned by the bank at which I'll likely have all my accounts anyway).

To tell you the truth I won't be making full use of what they offer either. But with discounts the price is just a lot better than most other places that offer just the basic packages.

Maybe I can hit you guys for a more technical question not totally unrelated... What's up with unmetered dedicated server accounts? Is that just a no cap free-flowing connection at a specific rate? So for instance a 10Mb unmetered account is a bit over 3TB/month?

Bruno

I ran a site that was hosted on Dreamhost for several years and the "client" was with them a previous year before I came along. I don't remember any down time at all. I basically just ftp'd to the thing and used the cpanel to manage email lists and email aliases. Pretty standard stuff.

I did stream a lot of video content from their servers and the performance was good for our use. All of this was with the basic plan.

One thing I do remember is how unprofessional the newsletters were. You'll know what I mean if you sign up.

We ended up moving to a local host for about 1/3 the cost. We don't have the same level of service or up time, but it meets our needs for what the site does.

Fair enough. I guess I was laboring under the conception that people would want to go to https://www.example.com/ and not https://www.example.com:4433/ .

Which reminds me of one of my favorite IE bugs. You can type "www.example.com" (without the "http://") into IE and get to the appropriate web site. But if you want to use a non-standard port, you can't type in "www.example.com:8080". Nooo. You have to type in "http://www.example.com:8080". And the best part is the useless error message it gives you: "The page cannot be displayed ... Open the s: home page, and then look for links to the information you want." Uh, what?

Bruno, did you end up going with Dreamhost? I'm considering switching my web host, and they have a far better deal than what I have now. The only thing turning me off at the moment is that their main site seems to frequently be unresponsive. I just tried going to it a couple minutes ago, and couldn't load the page. I did a traceroute and it ended with a router on their end not responding.

This also happened last week when I was shopping for a plan on their site. I had some questions and it took me quite a few tries to submit a form on their site. It wasn't something that grew a lot of confidence for their service.

Is anyone seeing this type of problem with their own sites on Dreamhost?

I use dreamhost and I noticed my sites were down for at least 5-10 minutes a few hours ago. It also happened the other day. I don't usually see downtime very often and it's usually not for very long. Dreamhost kicks ass. You won't regret it.

Thanks. I'm certainly excited about the increases in almost every aspect. My current host is charging me $100 a year for 250MB of space. Yes, megabytes. Of course, it's a place in the UK, so I'm getting screwed on the exchange rate. But when I signed up over three years ago for $80 a year for "unlimited" storage, it wasn't so bad a deal.

I'm going to go for the "Code Monster" account, since they have such a huge deal going on at the moment.

Has anyone had much experience with transferring web sites? I know what's involved with trying to more my data and my databases to the new location (it won't be fun), but I don't know anything about transferring domains. I have the domain registered with someone other than my host.

They say that you get one free domain registration? I assume that means for a year, right? Is it for as long as you hold the account?

Wow, I just noticed the weekly disk space increase on the Code Monster account is 480MB. It's depressing that every week Dreamhost users are getting twice the total space I have currently added to their accounts. Okay, I'm switching

It's still worrying that their site is very difficult to get around at the moment. Pages aren't loading.

I haven't used it enough to comment on its uptime. I know their PHP installation is missing bcmath which I require for generating encrypted keys - so we had to install our own PHP. And I know their provided shopping cart software, miva merchant is a royal pain in the butt. I had to scrap the installation I had set up.

Thier control panel is not the friendliest by a long shot, but gives you shortcuts for a LOT of functionality. The price, storage and bandwidth are great though.

Search for a discount code before signing up. There are tons. Anyone with an account can offer a code with up to a certain dollar discount (that person would keep the a certain amount for themselves or offer the whole thing as a discount). I signed up with $97-off.

I would still recommend it if you need the bandwidth and like the cost. Otherwise, another provider I mentioned a while back, ICDSoft, is very good with decent pricing.

Transfering hosts when your domain is with a registrar is no problem. Moving files is the hardest part actullay. Once you sign up just change the DNS record at the registrar to the servers provided to you by Dreamhost (or whomever).

Bruno

The problem is that I want to register my domain with the new company, so how do I do that? Won't they see it as already registered?

I checked out ICDSoft, but their values are nowhere near Dreamhost. It's not even much better than my current host.

You just need to do a domain transfer. I think Dreamhost's signup process allows for that. They will send a request to your current registrar and then you (as the registrant) will receive a notification and request for authorization. Generally you just need to reply to that request via email. The transfer may take a few days to complete.

However, that said, I would not advise transfering your domain to Dreamhost. I just like keeping my domains with a proper registrar and not a host trying to play registrar. Namecheap is a good registrar with a pretty nice control panel and decent prices if you do want to switch to someone else ($8.88 per year)

Bruno

Appologies for bringing this thread back a second time.

Tony mentioned that he does backups to his DreamHost account. Unforunately the software he uses is primarily a Linux app. Does anyone know of a really slick, simple bit of Windows software that will backup files to my new account (preferably free)? I don't even know what to do with my 60GB yet. Regular backups of important data seems like a good idea to me...

Well, WinSCP has some behaviors that I don't care for, but I might give it a try for this purpose. By slick I guess I just meant that I didn't want some bloated software that does a ton of stuff that I don't need.

Rsync over ssh is what you want. With a little scripting it should be more than capable of what you're looking for.

Matthew

Yeah, rsync is what I would have recommended if I hadn't been mislead by the word "slick"

I use rsync for all my remote backups, I distribute my data around four separate machines (one of which is off-site).

For anyone who's not in with Dreamhost yet, the "777" coupon is apparently active again for $0.77/month hosting. I'm pretty sure that's cheaper than any of the other referral type coupons going around. $9.24/year for what you get from Dreamhost is hard to beat.

Holy shit. Are these people insane or what? I wonder if I can extend the life of my account using one of these deals. I would try it, but their web panel seems to be down at the moment.