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Hosting is changing
The world of hosting has been changing, and often not for the better (at least from the perspective of hosting customers). As I noted in this post, many hosts are getting gobbled up by other firms, usually Wall Street firms looking to maximize profits by consolidating hosts, cutting services and maybe raising prices.
Another big trend is to go virtual. GoDaddy, for example, is moving into Amazon’s cloud. That certainly saves the expense of managing their own hosting centers and paying a hosting staff. More recently, the same is true with Siteground, which I have been using for a few years, which is going into Google’s cloud. Siteground has also raised prices rather substantially, hoping most clients will opt for inertia. For its shared hosting, Siteground keeps an eagle eye on resources you are using and will quickly complain if you go over these resources.
So I’ve been looking for acceptable alternatives, always aware to not to put too much faith in my web host of the moment, since there’s a good chance they’ll get bought out, raise prices, reduce staff or do all of these things. I tend to be irritated by hosts that provide generally incompetent support staff, obscure really important features like limits on disk space or outgoing emails, or who raise prices way beyond the rise in inflation.
A week spent in GoDaddy support hell
I thought GoDaddy had been improving in general. Going virtual wasn’t necessarily bad if the cloud provider can provide greater speed and reliability. But this month I got caught up with a client using GoDaddy which suggested they were reverting to old habits. It might have been because his board was on an old machine that hadn’t transitioned to the cloud yet. The support experience with GoDaddy though was just horrible.
His plan was so old it only supported PHP 5. There was no migration path to PHP 7 except to buy a new plan, and they couldn’t be bothered to help him move his gigabytes of files from the old to the new hosting, or transition the database. Not that we didn’t try. Downloading and uploading files from home is generally a painful, tedious and slow experience. The volume of files was large and the uploading was very tedious because his ISP severely limits upload speeds. It took days.
On the back end I was busy trying to upgrade his board and get that working. The shared hosting timed out exporting a database and timed out uploading it too. I tried all sorts of tricks to get it to work and upgraded the database on my machine since the upgrade scripts would time out due to resource caps. This went on for more than a week.
DreamHost turned out to be reasonably dreamy
Eventually I recommended he get rid of GoDaddy. But where to go? I sent him to DreamHost.
I had a good impression of DreamHost based solely on a seminar I attended at a Boston Wordcamp in 2019. In the seminar the speaker talked about how they fended off lawsuits by the Trump Administration to monitor their servers, and succeeded. I asked my peers about DreamHost and the reviews were generally positive. Still you don’t know until you try.
Was rehosting with DreamHost a wonderful experience? Overall it was pretty good, but it had its quirks. Like most hosts they offer various kinds of hosting, and the client chose the shared hosting plan. Loading his database on DreamHost, it timed out there too with resource limitations, but I was able to work around the problem. His database is nearly a gigabyte in size. Essentially I figured out where it failed (in the middle of populating the phpbb_posts table) and created an extract of the rest of the database. That got the rest of it. I’m just glad I have a text editor that can handle really big files (BBEdit, BTW).
Their tech support was responsive, helpful and reasonably quick. One thing I liked was that they didn’t have explicit quotas on database sizes and overall file sizes. That was important for this customer. Looking through the fine print of the hosting plan, I saw only one red flag: there was a limit of 100 outgoing emails per hour. That didn’t matter for this customer. It looked like a good fit.
Curiously my hosting plan with Siteground was up for renewal, so I took the plunge myself buying their multi-site shared hosting plan. Siteground wanted about $300/year, and this initial 3-year DreamHost contract was about $142, which is a huge savings. This got me more into the weeds.
The good:
- It’s a very good value. Naturally new customers get a discount. Mine is $3.95/month for three years (my contract) which is a great value if they can maintain the same level of service. The discount is 72%, so the non-discounted price is probably $12.95/month. This gives me unlimited storage, bandwidth and databases, making it a good deal if you have to store lots of stuff online. However, it is shared hosting so it’s not appropriate for highly trafficked sites.
- Technical support was reasonably quick, responsive and helpful, and I threw a lot of issues at them.
- Moving WordPress sites is easy. They offer a plugin you put on your old host. You enter the WordPress username and password and wait. It does the work for you.
- It’s easy and quick to set up free Let’s Encrypt certificates. But you have to wait until the DNS transfers to DreamHost. (There’s no way for any host to get around this.) So for a short period of time there will be certificate errors.
- End to end solid state hosting. This speeds up rendering of web pages and makes the hosting more reliable.
The bad:
- While tech support was good, they are based on the USA West Coast, and they work standard hours. It doesn’t appear that support is available outside of this window, although it is available seven days a week.
- 100 emails per hour is pretty skimpy. Anything over that just doesn’t get sent and won’t go into a queue for sending later.
- Testing your domain can be confusing. Your database server will have a subdomain like mysql.mysite.com but until the DNS transfers over the only way to test it with a database is to configure the database server’s IP address. (This was a problem with phpBB, but not with WordPress thanks to their plugin.) Otherwise modifying the local hosts file worked for testing. So you really need to remember that the server’s IP could change, so after the domain moves you should go back and replace the IP with the subdomain name.
- Their support system has no way to reply to a ticket, as best I can tell. So I coped by entering a new ticket with the same subject line.
The weird and unusual:
- No cPanel. They rolled their own control panel and it’s not the most intuitive. For example, it’s unintuitive to go to Domains > Manage websites to manage a website. Most hosts cleanly split domain functionality from web hosting.
- For each domain or subdomain you get a separate set of SSH and FTP credentials. Keeping these organized is a bit of a challenge!
If you can deal with these oddities, DreamHost may be for you. It is for me, presumably for the next three years at least! It does appear to be a very good value.
