Upstart Blogger has one of the most famous Dreamhost sucks stories online. In case you haven’t already seen it you can read it here.
Before I took over Upstart Blogger in December last year I too had been stunned by the absolute stupidity of the Dreamhost employees. Those wonderful Dreamhost employees who grin and pose in ridiculous photos advertising the fact that they own the company.
There are plenty of Dreamhost refugess out there. Bloggers who have had their accounts deleted without warning, sudden deletion of all backups, and even illegal hijacking of domain names. I know you’re out there so please vent your frustration and share your story in the comments below.
In the meantime, here’s what happened to me last August, on the fateful Friday night when Dreamhost pulled the plug and I recieved the following email,
Hello,
Your account has been permanently disabled without refund for violations
of our Terms of Service and anti-spam policy. Spamming weblog
comments/trackbacks in promotion of your hosted site “brassrevolver.com”
(a SEO link farm) is strictly prohibited.Jeff
It was sent at 9.13 PM. My initial reply of “what the hell are you doing?” fell on deaf ears since the Dreamhost support team go home at the weekend.
I was stunned. The allegations made in the email were completely false. I have never spammed any weblogs and Brass Revolver is certainly not a SEO link farm.
Trying to get any response from Dreamhost is like trying to wake the dead. Try finding a contact telephone number for them. The only one that is listed goes straight to an answering machine.
The grim situation was made worse by the fact that around half of my domain names were registered with Dreamhost and I couldn’t access them to transfer them away. When Dreamhost shut you out, they shut you out of everything.
Monday came and went, as did Tuesday, and then on Wednesday I received a reply to my emails which left me amazed.
Hello,
Your blog is linking to other blogs that are clearly operated by you. Comments are made on these blogs which are then linked to other blogs. You are building a link farm and this is in violation of our TOS.
Your domain names will not be made available to you. You will forfeit these since you have violated our TOS.
No backups will be made available to you since you have violated our TOS.
Jeff
Lets look at these points one at a time. I run a number of websites, some for myself and some for other musicians. There is no sinister motive for this. Along with a couple of musicians I was building two independent record labels. Each musician has a blog. These blogs are interlinked.
Is that illegal? Is that in violation of any professional hosts TOS? Is that a link farm?
No, no, and no.
It seems Dreamhost doesn’t like anyone hosting more than one blog with them if they plan to link them together or comment amongst them.
The next part was potentially more worrying however. I had already switched hosting to AN Hosting, who had been very helpful about the whole thing, but how was I going to get my domain names back from Dreamhost? Aggressive emails went back and forth between Jeff from Dreamhost, his support monkeys, and myself but they point blank refused to allow me to transfer my domains away from them. Every time I tried to initiate a transfer of my domains away from them the transfer was refused. All I got was the same response over and over again.
Your domain names will not be made available to you. You will forfeit these since you have violated our TOS.
I spoke to my new host and also to Directnic who were helping me transfer my domains to them. They both told me to issue a complaint to Internic since Dreamhost were clearly acting illegally by refusing to transfer the domains.
To cut a long story short the complaint worked. I cc’d it to Jeff at Dreamhost and, surprise surprise, my domains transfers were approved.
I was never given access to the backups by Dreamhost and had to put the websites back together piece by piece. AN Hosting did everything they could to make things as easy as possible, but without backups it was an arduous task. My personal blog is still full of holes as a result. Now I use a Wordpress backup script to email a copy of all my wordpress databases to my gmail account every night.
Have you got a Dreamhost sucks story? Leave a comment below and share it with the world. If this post strikes a chord with you please hit the Digg button. Who knows, maybe Dreamhost will take notice.
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12 Comments
WOW.
I think I’d like to know about that plugin that emails backups though.
Wow, really sorry to hear your story. I’ve been with Dreamhost for around 6 years now, and I’ve seldom had a problem with them. They recently emailed me a long list of overdue invoices that I had to pay asap, but I replied questioning it and they immediately apologized for the accounting glitch.
Overall, I have to say that I’ve been pretty happy there… prices are unbelievable, and I’ve found the people to be friendly and funny. Not always perfect, but the “human aspect” of the company is what has kept me around for so long. And their newsletters are the only ones I actually ever read because they’re so entertaining.
I’ve actually had the opportunity to interact with Media Temple this last year at work and by comparison I have to say I don’t understand how one got the stellar reputation and the other got the crappy reputation.
Maybe it’s just me. My disposition might seem vapid or naive, but I’d love to hear more level-headed commentary about them because information is always good. For now I really can’t complain.
Whoah, I’m sorry to hear about them doing that to you.
I’ve been with dreamhost for a couple years now and haven’t had any problems at all. The couple times I contacted their support staff with general questions I received fast and helpful responses.
…that’s just my experience though.
I am going through something similar to this right now and Dreamhost is currently holding 3 years worth of my work, as well as almost a dozen domain names, hostage.
My forum software license key has expired and all I had to do was renew it but Dreamhost flagged it as a violation of ToS. They think it’s pirated, but I have TWO YEARS OF INVOICES for the forum software.
My site, my domains, my databases, my files, all gone. No warning, just a sudden “Your account has been permanently disabled without refund for violations
of our Terms of Service”. I run a community site with hundreds of active members and we’re all feeling much outrage and helplessness here.
Same Jeff guy too. He seems a little overzealous in his pursuit of people to ban.
I have a lot of problems with Dreamhost. They closed my 5 accounts without telling me why, after 11 days, they did not charge back the money for almost a whole year and, more important, I have 5 domain names registered with them where I am the registrant and for which I requested the authorization code to transfer it to another registrar, but I received no answer it.
So I dedicated to Dreamhost a special category at http://www.setthings.com/category/dreamhost/
I made more complaints at federal Trade Comission, Better Business Bureau, but it seems that Dreamhost is above the law.
dreamhost shuts off my site claims im using to much CPU time.
no warning nothing just shuts it off.
do not use dreamhost if u want to do this:
1) use any image magick commands whatsoever
2) have a wallpaper site
3) intend to have over 1000 hits/day
if you want any of those above and u get the “WORLD CLASS” dreamhost shared hosting, 99.9% of the time your site will be shut off at random.
It’s not only dreamhost.
Eleven2.com has the same bad manners…
I had very bad experiences with them, they suddenly move your webspace to other servers without announcement, scripts won’t run anymore, newsletters will not be possible anymore (no more than 200 mails/h) and other stupid things and an extremely egocentric person there (won’t name his f… name)
you will be charged anew even months after your account is closed there..
and more..
Dreamhost are a bunch of bumbling fools. Totally inept. This week we had issues with our shell accounts and web sites, they’ve been working on it for 2 days straight and I’m still getting strange “out of disk space” errors (using about 6mb out of 500GB allotted to my account.)
They’re doing so bad this week that their last update on the issues said “For those of you who wish to cancel service with us, please call me directly at…” Ouch.
Chris - did they publish a phone number? If so, and you made a note of it, please post it here. I’m sure many people will find it very useful.
my mistake, he only gave email address ralph@dreamhost.com
They do have a support fax # 323.583.9505
Tonight I’m beginning the transition to OCS Solutions for hosting. 3 network centers, redundancy. Bye bye sucky dreamhost.
I haven’t been really burned by DreamHost like you have. But I am starting to feel irritated by the way they manage their servers and am starting to look elsewhere.
At times, they have not been cautious enough when upgrading software. Once they upgraded Ruby on Rails without warning and left a whole bunch of RoR sites hosted with them inoperable. Maybe that could have been prevented by the webmasters using the sage “freeze your Rubygems” advice, but still… could’ve been handled better, I think.
I think that incident made them gun-shy, because now, more often than not, they are *afraid* to upgrade things. I’ve been looking into HTML::Mason for Perl and was pleased to find it already available on my DreamHost server–until I discovered that they use a version that is *almost 4 years out of date*. Their suggestion box is peppered with notes begging for out-of-date software to be upgraded, a fair amount of it vulnerable to publicized security flaws.
Your referral to AN Hosting has not gone unnoticed. Naturally I’m wondering whether their track record for updating their servers is any better.
I’ve been using Dreamhost for about a year. They were like my savior from on high for the first six months, doing everything I could possibly imagine to make my service wonderful.
Then one day, I noticed about half of my server content deleted. Six months worth of artwork backups just plain missing.
So, of course, I emailed them wondering what the hell was going on. I got a reply from the same Jeff guy telling me that he doesn’t know about nor can he see anything about nor does he CARE about the deleted files, and followed to threaten shutting down my account because I had the installer for an old version of phpproxy in some obscure folder.
He claimed the only reason that they’d ever delete files is because of copyright infringement, but I daresay that if original artwork created by me is infringing the copyright on someone I’d know about it.
I replied, stating their claims were fallacious, and that ANY data that was on my server I held the exclusive rights and licenses to.
But he would not relent. He seemed to be certain that I was running some kind of piracy supernetwork and would not restore my files to me.
So it’s literally back to the drawing board. I’ve about another two weeks left on my yearlong contract with them after which I can finally say goodbye to the constant arsebuggery, and to the complete lack of customer care that is Jeff.