I refuse to pay because it was supposed to be free.

The upshot is that because I won’t pay ten bucks for something they told me was free, they have frozen my account and several other domains that I paid to keep for ten years.
You can talk and talk and talk, but they won’t back down.

I usually don’t complain about things - I should have asked for a refund when mysql wouldn’t function on their servers as advertised. The boneheads have my money and they want more - they’re holding me hostage.
I may eventually pay the 9.95 to get my domains released, sometimes life isn’t fair.
Dreamhost was a bad deal for me!

If a domain you purchase from someone else is hosted at DreamHost, you can’t move the domain to your new account if you use an promotion code to sign up. Just be warned. If it’s a new domain or hosted on another service, you’re good to go.

I’ve also heard that they have strict limits against CPU use, terminating accounts for just one violation. You might think a way to work around that would be to set up a second account for a high-CPU using domain, but think again. They can suspend both your accounts as they only allow one person to own one account at a time. That’s right, won’t let you give them extra money for extra hosting!

In short, it doesn’t seem like they want you to have a successful website, and certainly not multiple successes. They just want you to host one low-traffic blog or something so they can cram a bunch of accounts on one server and take your money.

That being said, I’ve had a much better experience with them than with GoDaddy’s hosting. I’m not sure how good other services are.

In short, when dealing with registrars and hosts, I’m going to host my site and register my domain with different companies. I’m also going to make frequent backups in case whichever host I’m using decides to play games with me.

And, thanks to DreamHost’s restrictions, I’ll apparently have to get a second hosting service eventually, or move off of their services completely. I’d pay them more money for more hosting, but they just won’t let me.

Friends if u r in dreamhost get out of there,they are blood and money suckers,yesterday disabled my account without any warning.And they are not so best.,their server always down.

If you are in dreamhost,,get out of there and choose another best host.

Also, Jeff C. over there is completely rude. Man, he must be married to a dead rat or something.

They, sent me an email saying it is not in their TOS.

They have threatened to cancel my service. I am running around to copy everything down and close DreamHost asap.

First, things that take normally moments to propagate on a server take for ever on DH. I don’t think it should take an hour for a new email account to show up.

To get them to respond to an “Urgent” help ticket within 36 hours (not counting the “we know about your ticket and will get to it asap” response that comes automatically after 24 hours without response) is to enter 3 or 4 tickets asking (begging) them to get to your first ticket.

Beyond lack of support, the kicker for me was when I found out that with their system if you delete a user on the account, everything the user ever did on the account automatically gets deleted. A lovely surprse. Oh, and their system, unlike most hosts (at least the one I use) has no default automatic backups. Delete user, site disappears, client is pissed, I work 20 hours straight to appease.

DH could at least offer the courtesy of a reach-around with their hosting plans.

I paid for a full year unfortunately, and can’t get my money back!!!

Go with the more expensive hosting services and save the hastle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

I think I’d like to know about that plugin that emails backups though.