Dreamhost have done it again. Imagine you are a blogger with a ten year blogging anniversary coming up in the next few months. Then, for no valid reason and with no notice, Dreamhost cancels your account and refuses to give you access to any working backups. And, to make matters worse, the backups that you have been downloading from Dreamhost over the last few years are all corrupted and completely unusable.
How angry would you be?
My experience with Dreamhost was bad but nothing says “Dreamhost Sucks” quite as comprehensively as this tale of woe from Cornelius, a ten year veteran of the pop culture blogging scene.
Dreamhost could fix this problem if they wanted to. They could provide me with a recent and working copy of my database since I’m sure they still have a copy. I doubt a company like Dreamhost ever completely purges its backups, especially given the amount of time the servers seem to crash. But no, they steadfastly refuse to help. All of my emails, after the initial exchange when they first deleted my account a week or so ago, are ignored.
This is exactly what happened to me when Dreamhost deleted my account. No warning was given and any request for help was met with a stone wall of silence.
Once again, Dreamhost prove that they are nothing more than a bunch of amateurs playing at being a hosting company. If you are thinking of using them, don’t. And if you are currently hosted with them, move as quickly as you can to a professional host now, before it’s too late.
there has got to be some level of regulation. now that the blogosphere has become so profitable, there has to be some level of protection out there for intellectual property. Dreamhost has every right to decide what sits on their servers, but they don’t have the right to refuse to give you whats rightfully yours. fine, Dreamhost wants to refuse to give up what can be considered the ‘essence’ of a blog – they should be legally obligated to pay what that blog is worth. either that, or they need to ass-up a working backup. my wife showcases and sells handmade jewelry in local shops around town here in SC. she pays rent for a booth plus like 10%. these shops can decide refuse to display her goods. they can not, however, refuse to give her back our merchandise once its pulled from the shelf. it still belongs to us.
i don’t see why dreamhost should be any different. that blog belongs to someone.
It’d be nice if webhosts contacted you directly before taking your site offline or deleting your account, eh?
A girl can dream.
=P
Oh my God. It was a nightmare when this happened to me. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
i don’t know, mediatemple never goes wrong, so i guess if you think ten years of history is important for you then invest a little, and host with a “company”.
I have to second curtis…is there no legal recourse? Cornelius, I feel for you, I really do. Please let the community know if there’s anything we can do to help.
I hesitated to move from DreamHost. But now, after reading your post here, I am ready.
The main hurdle for me now is how to move a site with SQL databases like Worpdress the easiest way?
There’s got to be some legal recourse this person can take.
While I feel really bad and it;s too late for my advice, this is a good example fo why you shoudl make your own backups as well.
What if the data center blew up, for example (extreme I know)?
A client I work with recently lost all his domains on DH. Some were not even hosted there. Apparantly DH is not replying to his mails and the control panel access is not allowing him to transfer his domains out.
It sucks when a host tried to play God.
Oh and check this out http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/09/03/janky-debian-upgrades-and-you/
They apply updates without a by your leave and then act as if it was your mistake to not be prepared for a kick in the balls ever so often…..
Rascals
I think the same thing is about to happen to me. I just got the email from Dreamhost, where they claim that 5 of my blogs are ’scraper’ sites. So they have deleted the account, about 30 websites instantly deleted. I don’t have backups, I didn’t think a web host would delete ALL of my websites without warning. I am trying to resolve it and at least get access to backups so I can move them to a real host.
This is devastating to me and I cannot believe a hosting company would find it acceptable to simply delete all of those client websites.
Regardless of the outcome of my situation I would not reccomend Dreamhost to my worst enemy. DO NOT HOST WITH DREAMHOST.
When starting my blog, I planned to use Dreamhost but then I changed my mind. Thank you for the warnings.
DreamHost have recently mailed me saying that one of the accounts in my name was flagged as fraudulent and they suspended the account with no further information. I chased them for around a week, getting responses varying from “security flag” to “on our spam list”. Having never spammed anyone in my life, i was a little taken aback but resolved to just setup the client site on a new server asap. What i didnt realise is that, with the clients domain being half transferred into DreamHost at the time of this cancellation, the domain was now stuck in-limbo and has been for the last two weeks. Any attempt to contact DreamHost and im auto-redirected to their abuse desk and get the treatment of a gitmo detainee. I have 5 accounts with them for other clients and had 4 years of no issues. Absolute scum. They should have their license to trade revoked.
We are running a popular communities portal hosted by Dreamhost.
A few weeks ago, some lunatic or maybe a competitor contacted Dreamhost claiming that he allegedly has copyright on a paragraph and a picture in a blog posted by a user in the website.
Dreamhost, without inquiring the matter at all, without checking with us before, without giving us the opportunity to suspend the alleged copyright content until we investigate the matter with the user, they simply shut down the whole website immediately and then went home for weekend. Unbelievable!, there was no one to talk to there for 5 whole days. For 5 days, our service was down! The business damage was huge. We tried to contact them through all communication means, filed numerous support tickets. Nothing.
A childish irresponsible and rude person in Dreamhost that calls himself “Robert R.” and who is supposed to be in charge of copyright couldn’t understand what he did wrong simply writing to us among other things: “I do not work weekends”. Furthermore, not only he didn’t acknowledge his negligence, he refused at the beginning to bring the site back to operation and was misleading and completely uncooperative.
We tried to file a complaint about this person with Dreamhost but the company simply ignored our repetitive requests to get a contact person for complaints. Having no direct way to file our complaint directly, we decided to share our misfortunate experience with others.
We are planning to disclose in public the full correspondence with this “Robert R.” so that others will understand the scope of the problem there and we are considering filing a law suit to charge damages. We are of course looking for a new hosting for our websites and those of our customers.
This severe incident is in addition to constant network and infrastructure problems and inefficient support service.
To sum it all, the people at Dreamhost simply don’t care and apparently there is no true managerial level there to tell them that they should. It appears that “employee owned” business is not such a good idea after all. We are strongly advising others to think twice before making our mistake and to select a serious and professional hosting service.
yes of course they are suckers, i was using dreamhost.com since 2 years but now they are just messed up, i did host my one friend’s movie site and he was just hosting images on the site and rest of all links were off site, they got a copyright complain and they banned my account without any warning, this is totally messed up
There are many large hosting companies but they never do like this, first they warn and then they take action even they just remove that copyright content or max they block your site but these dogs just banned the whole account without any warning
be careful guys, they are very dangerous and they can harm you anytime so i’d advise to avoid using http://www.dreamhost.com