I've been hosted with Dreamhost since July of 2007. I'm happy, and I'm not leaving anytime soon. Here's why.

Stability
My site has only experienced downtime twice in the last year. An upgrade of a PERL library used for accessing MySQL databases didn't work as planned, and things kind of went boom. This blog couldn't be updated, but it was still online and accessible to the world. A networking problem took out the whole hosting center, but only for a number of hours and that's really it for downtime in the last 12 months.

Cost
It takes an impressive amount of regular traffic to use up 5 terabytes of bandwidth per month. If you don't know what that means, let me put it this way: if you're using 5TB of bandwidth per month, you can afford a hosting plan in the hundreds per month range just from cheap contextual advertising alone.

Suitability
I'm no Daily Kos and you probably aren't either. You don't need 100 of your own servers and a fulltime staff of your own to manage your site. If you want a place to start and grow from or even if you're looking to move a site receiving tens of thousands of page views per day, Dreamhost will be happy to work for you to make it happen. Dreamhost exists for people like us.

Honesty
All hosting businesses have problems, but very few will tell you about all of them. Dreamhost maintains an off-site blog featuring regular updates on all hosting problems whether they affect only you, or an entire cluster of servers that have no impact on your service at all. It looks scary at first with so many problems regularly posted, but it feels a lot better once you realize that all hosting services have these problems, and they just don't bother to tell you about them.

Environmentally Friendly
Dreamhost is a carbon-neutral hosting company!

The Plan
Dreamhost recently smushed all their plans into one big great one, here's just a few things you get for $10.95 per month (pre-pay: $9.95/mo for 1 year, $8.95/mo for 2 years, $7.95/mo for 3 years, $6.95/mo for 5 years. $49.95 set up fee if you pay monthly.)

  • 500GB of diskspace per month.

  • 5TB of bandwidth per month.

  • Unlimited databases, email accounts, shells, and FTP accounts.

  • 1 free domain registration.

  • PHP4/5, Ruby, PERL, CGI

  • Backups

  • And amongst many other things, your bandwidth and diskspace allotments increase every week. Since I signed up in July of 2007 (as of June 2008) I have nearly 6TB of bandwidth now -- not that I come anywhere close to using it.

Not enough? They also offer a full 97-day refund if you aren't happy. Excuse me for whoring for them, but I really couldn't be more pleased with this host. They've been around over 10 years and are one of the largest shared hosting companies in the country.

If you're looking, give them a try.

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