Moved Hosts

Written by adam on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 09:02

Even though my poll indicated people tolerated the slow loading speed that Dreamhost was giving me I moved anyways. My 1-year renewal was up and I couldn't justify paying for something that was so damn slow. It might not have made much of a difference on this site but some of my others were worse.

The straw that broke the camel's back
Dreamhost has a bad attitude of So what? We're cheap. You don't get reliability for cheap so we'll do whatever we want. They brag about how they have such great management tools (eh, poke around their servers and you can find a bunch of perl scripts that seem alright) but they couldn't make one to switch everybody over to hardware waiting in their new datacenter. Instead, they physically moved their current hardware for over 8 hours to a new datacenter (it took longer than they expected). Here's an excerpt of the email I received on 1/28/08:

Due to continued space and power constraints in our primary data center,
we will be moving the “randy” cluster to one of our newer data centers.
This move will begin Friday, February 8, at 10PM PST, and is expected to
last up to 8 hours, until Saturday, February 9, 6AM PST. All web servers,
mail servers, file servers, and MySQL servers in the randy cluster will be
unreachable during this time.

Spec Comparison

Slicehost:
RAM 256MB
Storage 10GB
Bandwidth 100GB
Cost $20/mo
CPU 4x Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2212 HE Shared between 7-24 other users
Dreamhost:
RAM 4GB shared between 1100+ users
Storage 302.2GB
Bandwidth 6156GB
Cost $10/mo
CPU 2x Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 175 shared between 1100+ users

So pretty much I'm paying $10/mo more for way more RAM and processing power and less of everything else. Oh, and it's a VPS so I get to configure the server exactly how I want it.

Comments

Anonymous (not verified)

Sat, 08/02/2008 - 21:26

I wonder how those bandwidth figures play out in real life... I imagine smallish site like this doesn't come close to the SliceHost limit?

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Anonymous (not verified)

Tue, 08/12/2008 - 14:24

This site does almost no traffic. I only get around 80 hits/day. I use 2-3GB/month and almost all of it is from using the SOCKS proxy when on unsecure wifi. To help get a better idea what it takes to do I checked one of the ecommerce websites I manage and for july it used 80GB for 2 million page views.

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Anonymous (not verified)

Sun, 08/03/2008 - 12:35

Hey Adam,

I'm currently on Dreamhost, and been through some of the stuff you mention. So I'm keeping alternative hosts in mind. How are you liking Slicehost so far?

Thanks for the info--

barrettmo

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Anonymous (not verified)

Tue, 08/12/2008 - 14:05

Slicehost is great so far. The few times I've needed to talk to the owners I've been able to open up their chat room and get things resolved immediately (usually adding IPs to a slice). They have tools that email you if your slice is using a large amount of resources (run away processes and such). The one time the server my slice is on was having hardware trouble they emailed to say that there were problems and it *may* go down. It turned out they were able to resolve the issue without any downtime.

Bottom line is they have awesome customer support and tell it to you straight.

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