Category: dreamhost
EngineHosting
I have been having problems with my site hosting for close to a year now. Dreamhost had been a solid provider of hosting services before then but then things change. For me, most of the issues had to do with small mistakes which would render my site unusable. Such an incident happened a few days ago when a borked PHP config file caused the Dreamhost server (and therefore my site) to stop parsing PHP files and instead offer them for download. I wish Dreamhost the best, but they need to get their config issues reigned in to have a chance at maintaining their customer base.
I’ve moved to EngineHosting and am so far pleased with what I see. What I find refreshing is that they seem to do things a bit differently than traditional hosting companies. With most hosting companies, they offer minimal direct contact with support staff and a large control panel to allow the customer to do most of the work. With EngineHosting, they offer a modest control panel, but a very responsive staff that handles the mundane config and setup requests. In overall experience, the difference in philosophy reminds me of the difference between self- and full-service gasoline with one big difference: the hosting is the same price.
While all the pages are working, I still need to have EngineHosting support staff initiate a domain registrar transfer and setup one cron-esque process for me so the latest tracks will regularly update. Other than that, the move was not as painful as I had anticipated.
Posted: 04.17.2008Dreamhost Issues
I think the tags say it all…
Posted: 04.15.2008DreamHost and EE
I have been pretty happy with EE since I installed it. The system is flexible, all dynamic, and it’s easy enough to create new pages quickly. Once all the templates for things like the header, sidebar, tabs, and footer were set, generating a new page is a painless process.
The one problem I had was getting search friendly URLs generated. At first, I had enabled the “Force Query Strings” option in EE which allowed the basic system to function when I thought the issue was with the PATH_INFO variable. After doing some digging around and trying a few workarounds, it turns out that the problem on DreamHost was the fact that PHP-CGI was enabled as the default option when PHP as an Apache module was necessary. After making the change, and disabling the “Force Query Strings”, it is all working as intended.
Posted: 11.06.2006DreamHost
I admire honesty where I see it. Too much of the world is built on lies or at the very least deception.
Recently, DreamHost (the company that hosts DigiFiend and a couple of other sites I manage) has been having some problems. I hadn't seen most of the problems as I have been busy with projects that haven't allowed me to access any of the DreamHost sites. I did try to make some revisions on a site yesterday and found that I couldn't access the admin page or the general website. Naturally, I was alarmed and went to DreamHost's forums and technical support resources to investigate. Before I could finish investigating the problem, the admin and general web pages reappeared and all was well with the world again.
Today, I received an newsletter from DreamHost with an entry labeled Anatomy of an Ongoing Disaster. After reading through this article, I was impressed with the amount of honesty presented in the article. As an I.T. professional, the tendency is to initially limit the amount of information distributed during a crisis, and only distrubute information as necessary. Dreamhost got it right by letting it's readership know what was happening and what the game plan was to resolve it.
Good job Dreamhost!
Posted: 08.01.2006