Comments on: Dreamhost Deal

By: Insert Real Name

Insert Real Name — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 06:03:55 +0000

I signed up to exactly the same deal a few weeks ago.
The only bummer so far is that I was hoping to switch from using CVS to Subversion, but the Linux NFS-mounted home directories lead to the ‘make fsfscheck’ sanity checks (before ‘make install’) randomly failing for repositories located on the mounted file system. The Subversion FAQ suggests changing the NFS mount options, but I doubt if the dreamhost team would do that–I’ll try a support ticket, though.

The other small beauty spot is their self-signed SSL certificates used in secure access to IMAP accounts generated a browser/mail-client SSL warning dialog bacause the hostname in the certificate does not match the actual hostname. but that’s a complicated problem to manage, apparently, when there are a lot of aliased machines in a cluster handling email.

I’m still uncertain exactly how reliable Dreamhost actually is; I suppose there are ways of determining that via cron-managed scripts doing various tests, but I’d be a little shy of imposing unnecessary loads on Dreamhost machines.

At the price we pay for the first year, I think one gets *more* than we paid for, though!

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:09:23 +0000

It is a great deal… I actually finished writing that post much later than 10:48 – I was up till about 1:30 that night backing stuff up and copying it over. So reading it now, it sorta feels like an informercial…and I hate informercials. But with all the positive feedback I’ve heard about Dreamhost, and my experience with them so far, I say go for it. The nice thing is that you don’t have to enter payment info until after you find out if the code still works…so if it has stopped working by then, you could wait.

By: Ray

Ray — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 19:07:05 +0000

Wow, that is one heck of a deal! I was going to ask you via comments yesterday whether or not the deal was still good, but I saw that you were in the middle of the move. I’m definitely moving over to Dreamhost if that deal is still good when I try it next week.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 18:29:51 +0000

Gotta love a good host. You got a great deal, it seems like the site move was easier than the home move.

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:40:52 +0000

I was able to get everything copied over last night, but getting it all working was another story. I had references all over my code to the server root from my old host, and for some reason mySQL didn’t want to import my 11MB Movable Type database. :) Thanks to the helpful support staff at my new favorite host though, I was able to get it installed via shell account command line. w00t!

By: Ash

Ash — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 19:07:20 +0000

I have also been wanting to change host for a little while now and this just seems like too good an opportunity to pass up.

Thanks for the tip!