It’s been a while since I switched over to Dreamhost for my hosting needs. I must say it’s been a very good experience so far. Though my experience with Media Temple was also good until I actually needed help from them. Alas, I don’t want to get on a tangent about my past problems with Media Temple but rather talk about how well Dreamhost has worked for me so far.

For starters all my cron jobs are running nicely and have been running without any problems since I set them up. Pretty sweet.

Next is communication. Dreamhost has a twitter account that updates when something is broken or upgraded or just a status update. It’s not overly useful to me but it says something about Dreamhost: they want their clients to know what’s going on. We all know stuff breaks and rather then making me call/email them to figure out why my site is broken they make it known what’s going on. Each tweet I’ve seen links over to the Dreamhost Status website that gives a more detailed explanation as to the current issue.

Support. Ahh yes. I’ve only put in one support ticket. Granted it was more of a question about how something worked rather then something being broken. But the support rep got back to me within one hour, gave me the answer and pointed me to the documentation I missed. I’m not sure I can express how awesome that is. Speedy and helpful!

The admin console is pretty easy to understand. Some of the things don’t make sense to me. For example: the mysql screens are under a section called “goodies”. Not a major issue but a little confusing if you aren’t expecting mysql to be a goodie.

The one issue I have with Dreamhost is the One-Click installer for Wordpress. You have two options: the first being they manage the install, do upgrades and what have you, the other you manage it yourself, they’ll install it but after that you maintain it. I haven’t done the first option as of yet, but the second one is kinda annoying. Dreamhost seems to know what you will want when they install it for you.</scrcasm> They’ve seem to think installing 50+ themes and 5+ plugins with your Wordpress install is a good idea. Well it’s not. So now when creating a new blog I have to go in and delete the themes just so I can make sense of things. It makes sense for the “they manage” option but if I’m going to be doing it, I’ll decide what I want, thanks.

Overall Dreamhost has done a good job of making me a happy customer. That on top of the discount I got from a friend is just awesome.