My website has moved house
Photo by foxtongue
When I first started out in web design I gave all my clients free hosting. While it worked well as a marketing tool, the monthly server I rented from Mediatemple was rather pricey. Even though Mediatemple’s service was quite reliable, I decided to look for a cheaper option.
So began my Dreamhost affair. In my opinion, Dreamhost have quite a few things going for them; they’re cheap, their accounts have very few limitations, and the guys who run the show have a brilliant sense of humour.
For a while, all seemed happy in Dreamhost land. Until last month, when this website, which is running WordPress, started breaking for no good reason. Every day, for 2-3 hours, it just died. And Dreamhost still haven’t been able to identify the problem, let alone fix it. Experiencing a couple of hours of downtime every day isn’t the greatest way to run a website, especially if your job is to keep websites running!
So I’ve made the decision to go back to Mediatemple. If you noticed any issues on my site over the weekend, it was probably due to DNS changes doing their thing. But as of this morning, it should all be sorted out. Which reminds me to send a big THANKS to Gerard McGarry for his article on Moving WordPress from Dreamhost to Mediatemple’s Grid Server. The move was hardly rocket science, but it’s nice to read about potential pitfalls from someone who’s been in your position before.
I think I’ve learned a good lesson in small business website hosting: don’t choose a service provider based solely on price. Choose the guys who can give you the support you need, and who have the infrastructure to keep you up and running.
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Back on talking terms with Dreamhost | UK small business website design, website maintenance by Dave Wilkinson (July 15th, 2008 at 9:44 pm)
[...] few weeks ago, I moved my website from Dreamhost to Media Temple. At the time, Dreamhost didn’t seem to be able to resolve problems with a couple of my [...]
Dave,
If you think $20/month is expensive for web hosting then you may want to re-do your expectations. That is less than the price of one dinner and with that you are expecting space, bandwidth, uptime, support, generators, etc.
I believe MT has a lot of issues as well so if you truly need shared hosting that is reliable take a look at someone like Pair or MediaLayer
Ross
-http://www.hostdisciple.com
Thanks Ross. While you make a good point that $20/month is really just small change, I disagree that you need to pay even that much.
The fact is that there are loads of hosting companies claiming to provide space, bandwidth, uptime, support, generators and all those good things, but none of them deliver everything 100% of the time. It would probably be abnormal if they did.
I’m fairly sure that mediatemple and Dreamhost both offer very similar packages, but their pricing structure is wildly different because their marketing differs.
I chose Mediatemple because I like them. They have style, and in my experience they backup their service with support. The bigger a company gets the more people will publicize every little problem they experience. That’s just human nature.
If I’m wrong, I’ll eat my words, but so far (3 days into it), my site hasn’t broken once. That’s worth thousands of Dollars to my business, and definitely worth $20/month.