Coming soon: Dreamhost Out, Slicehost In

I’ve been using Dreamhost since about October of 2007, on recommendation from a friend (actually just noticing that he was using it for his blog). I could tell that they were overselling from the start. They advertise 5TB of bandwidth per month, which is 1.92MB(15.36Mb) per second continously per ‘client’ per month. With the fact that I understand they have at least 100, if not thousands of users per server… this quickly becomes rediculous. Amazon’s EC2/S3 is $0.20USD/GB of transfer. They ‘actually’ serve that much up. 5TB/month would cost $1,000USD on EC2. Amazon’s margin on this isn’t that big. Certainly not $995 of margin on it.

Dreamhost basically sells just what their name is, a dream. It is not reality, could not be reality and will never be reality. I kind of wish I could easily set up a test to show that there is no way they could offer that bandwidth and never would. I just don’t have a connection that would be able to push that myself in order to do the transfer.

Dreamhost has given me nothing but slow speeds, much downtime and many headaches. I like the simplicity of some of their things (DNS management, 1-click installers) but honestly I need uptime and speed more than anything else.

So I am moving to Slicehost in a few days. It’s twice as much as Dreamhost for a single 256mb slice, but that should be more than enough really. It’s a known quantity and they aren’t overselling. Dan Choi is going to help me move. There might be a tiny bit of downtime over the next few days while the DNS propogates, but soon hopefully we will have a sweet and snappy site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 5:48 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.