Did Dreamhost ever unscramble its snafu?

[dreamshark]

I heard the beginning of that story, but not the end. Did Dreamhost users ever get their accounts unsnarled? Did they get their money back?

I'm thinking of this as I watch my own website hosting service, iPower, trip all over its own feet AGAIN as it attempts to transition to a new version of their hosting software. They screw up my account pretty much every time they try to change anything. Sooner or later, after many emails to clueless tech support people in India, they straighten it out. It's really irritating, but never quite irritating enough to make me go through the enormous hassle of switching services. And they ARE cheap, I must admit ($95/year, including automatic renewal of my primary domain).

This time it almost looked like it was going to work. I got the email about the Big Transition. My account was moved, and I could still get to www.dreamshark.com (which is the subdomain I currently use the most). However, my primary domain (kahnhome.org) and my other subdomain (toonerville.net) had disappeared, at least as far as the Internet DNS servers were concerned. I emailed tech support, getting a polite but completely wrong answer back the next morning ("I checked the domain ‘kahnhome.org’ and noticed that it is not registered nor hosted with us. Hence, you need to contact your current hosting provider regarding the Web site.") I tried again, forwarding old email as proof that they ARE my current hosting provider. Again with the polite, canned, wrong answer. I forwarded more proof. Finally I got a humble apology ("I am extremely sorry for the incorrect information that has provided in the previous e-mail. Could you please ignore that e-mail?"). Somebody fixed something, because www.kahnhome.org is back. However, I am still trying to convince them that toonerville.net was also registered through them. It looks like they failed to renew that one months ago, and somebody else may have grabbed it. *sigh*

Comments

[daedala.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that it was fixed right away.

The credit card I'd originally used had been closed, so it didn't affect me.

[laurel]

Kevin got his money back, but it took almost a week or maybe a week. Probably longer than it would've otherwise because it happened right before a holiday weekend.

I've been looking around at other hosting providers; have even tried two before canceling them (they had 30 day trial periods so I got my money back).

What I've found is that DreamHost really does have one of the best user interfaces for making changes to your account. Their web-based admin tool is pretty spiffy.

There are better hosts if one is willing to do the sysadmin parts yourself (Slicehost would be the way to go if one is good with unix and likes setting everything up oneself).

But I'm still looking for a host to draw me away from Dreamhost.

I'd still probably recommend them with the following caveats: I wouldn't set up a credit card to autopay things or else would set a threshold (can't charge you more than X amount at a time). And if you have a mission critical server that can't handle downtime of multiple hours or even a day, it might not be the best because they've had their share of snafus over the years. Probably averages out to one a year, but for some people and applications, that's not acceptable.

They've never lost any of my data (web stuff, nor any email that I've noticed).

I haven't used them for domain registration (but they do that), I use joker.com for that and just have to remember to renew stuff (well, they email reminders).

[laurel]

If you ever want to give Dreamhost a look, it's very simple for me to create an account for you to use to look around.

And, of course, I'm an affiliate for them so if people sign up via my link, I get some money. (But that really doesn't influence my opinions here).

I've been with Dreamhost since 1999, I think. At least.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I don't like iPower either, and the transition to the new software was handled sloppily. It seems that my podcasts were disabled for several weeks (from the transition until I noticed and complained). To be fair, they did fix it right away (as in "when people got in on Monday") and I seem to have 300G of space instead of merely 100G. I still can't recommend them, but am unlikely to change hosts until they piss me off too much.

I don't know about other hosts. All I can say is: Make sure you back up your website, Just In Case.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I have it all backed up - on my removable hard drive and on DVD. But what with all the comic book cover scans, I REALLY don't want want to try to upload it all to a different web service. It would take DAYS with my comparatively slow connection (Qwest's lowest level of DSL, whatever that is these days).

They've never lost any of my data and I don't think I have ever seen the site go down or even respond slowly. They're just sloppy in their administration. I wouldn't even go so far as to say I dislike them - I think they're a good value if you don't have anything mission critical going on in your website. But they do require patience, and apparently slightly more attention than I was paying. It looks like I lost my toonerville.net domain through inattention. iPower was supposed to renew it automatically, but failed to do so, and some domain squatter grabbed it.

Have you tried their new control panel yet? It's a LOT better than the old one; at least the parts of it I've looked at. I haven't found some of the features yet, however. I hope they didn't remove features while they were spiffing up the interface.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I haven't looked at their new control panel yet. So far, I've mainly used their site stats. Which you have to click on a button to get them to update more than once a week, or something.

What else do they have? Aside from e-mail controls, which should be in place, I don't use them for anything.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

"I seem to have 300G of space instead of merely 100G"

OMG, you're right! Except... you had 100G before? I think I had something like 500 MEGABYTES on the old platform.

On the other hand, it's hard to know whether to believe them. The same panel that tells me I have 300G of space also claims I am using 0 bytes. Does your control panel show your disk usage correctly?

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I had to wrestle them up to 100G (from their previous transition) from the 10G which was standard before that. 500M was one of the old defaults. To their credit (and one of the reasons I'm still with them) is that they keep adding space to the cheapest sites. HD space is the cheapest thing they can do. Visi should figure this out.

Before the transition, I used maybe 10% of my possible space, and sometimes get up to 2% of my bandwidth allocation. I don't know where such stats are kept in their new format.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I found the stats, but mine said I was using 0 space. Then I refreshed the screen and suddenly I was using 318M (which is about right). Clearly, they are still bringing some of this stuff up.

So... I'm using about 1/1000 of my allotted space? Wow! I'd better start uploading stuff! Heck, I can put all the photos on my hard drive on my website now.

[laurel]

Dreamhost offers 500gig with their accounts (that are $10/month, less if you pay for more months in advance). They also have this funky plan where they add more space and bandwidth to your account depending on how long you've been with them. As a result, I have almost 700gig of space and 8600gig of bandwidth on my account which is rather insane.

Of course it's part of why I haven't left yet. Plus the fact that I have 20-some domains and subdomains there and a zillion files and sites and email accounts and lists and ghu knows what else. Would take forever to move or just be a big pain. My plan was to move my most mission critical and resource using site (TVPicks.net) if I found a good stable host. Just haven't found one I like enough yet.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

If the only reason you were thinking of moving was the billing snafu - I'd stay put if I were you. If it was resolved in a week and everybody got their money back - it just isn't that big a deal. I've heard horror stories about domain hosting sites that simply disappeared overnight with no notice. That's a lot worse, imho.

If I were starting from scratch right now I might well pick DreamHost over iPower. But annoying as their administrative screwups are, my site stays up and my data never gets lost. As you said, just thinking of uploading all those files again ...

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I wasn't affected by that round of Dreamhost brain-damage, I'm glad to say. People who were got fixed on the timescale Laurel mentions according to those I heard talking about it.

Slicehost, eh? I should look; lots easier to just edit a config file than mess with that huge unwieldy web panel thingy.