Post by: BSD2000 on June 28, 2012, 06:35:22 PM
Don't make the same mistake I did - don't go with Dreamhost.
I'm beginning to hate Dreamhost. They use old, under-powered servers and old, slow network switches. They are consistently down or slow every single day. Any freezing or failed MySQL/PHP process requests (the root of all the problems I experience) is blamed on the customers and is always treated as a opportunity to 'up-sell' you to more expensive hosting.
The problem with VinylAudio.net's hosting issues is dropped or 'killed' MySQL or PHP requests due to memory limits and 'CPU minute' overloads. Checking the daily resource logs, 95% of the time, this site uses very little CPU usage 'minutes' 97%. Most of the process kills are listed as 'exceeding memory limits'.
But the processes that are killed by the parser use less than 60MB, even though the PHP limit is set to 90MB. In practice, the majority of the killed requests were using less than 30MB at the time. According to Dreamhost, resources are shared (and over sold) to the point that they cannot guarantee what resources are available at any one time, even if they never exceed the memory limits. So, unless your website is simple, coded with HTML and have no PHP or MySQL requests, there's no guarantee page requests will be acknowledged or processed, depending on shared resource availability.
So, even if my website is efficient, score 90+ on Google Page Speed, implements sophisticated caching and CDN techniques, I'm at the mercy of the customer on my server with 100 (very busy) porn sites who uses massive amounts of PHP scripts and hammers the same SQL sever as me. Incidentally, Dreamhost locates the MySQL databases on a different physical server than the shared host server - sometimes in different data centers in different cities. Part of the delay and general slowness of the website can be attributed to the network traffic delays caused by large amounts of offsite network packets clogging the network.
So is VPS any better? Not from the people who use Dreamhost VPS that I've talked to. It's still shared, even if you have access to 300MB of 'protected' RAM. If someone else on the server overloads the parser, all the websites suffer speed issues, especially since Dreamhost uses old, slow AMD Opteron 4122 CPU's for shared servers, which offer the lowest I/O operations per second compared to Intel counterparts. If the servers had enough processing power, maybe it could handle the load instead of sitting there all day killing requests. But with Dreamhost, the image of being 'hip and cool' by using 'under dog' AMD CPU's outweighs the choice of using more powerful Intel processors.
When I first started with Dreamhost, they seemed fast and reliable. Now, they are slow and unreliable.
So the question is, do I continue the agony and stay with Dreamhost; or do I shell out $165+ for two years of hosting for another company such as Hostgator - maybe ask for a refund from Dreamhost?
Post by: lshin80 on July 04, 2012, 05:53:17 AM