Discourse.net

This is funny. Dreamhost, the cheap but imperfect hosts of this blog, have a blog of their own. And in a recent entry, DreamHost Blog | Web Hosting's Dirty Laundry, they describe their correspondence with a supposedly neutral and objective service that offers consumers reviews of hosting companies.

This is how hosting-reviews.com describes itself:

Hosting-Review is an independent provider of web hosting reviews. We base our reviews on knowledge, personal experience with webhosts and user feedback.

What emerges from their correspondence with Dreamhost, is a little different: if you want to be listed in their top 10, you pay them.

As an encore, Dreamhost offers a defense of their sales policies. It's written with a certain panache, and convincing as far as bandwidth and disk space go. But I can testify that there's nothing in the sales literature that I read which put me on notice as to their quite restrictive CPU throttling policies.

Basically, if this blog gets hit with a wave of spam, they threaten to pull the plug. And I've had to disable a number of PHP-intensive things to keep CPU usage down. DH's business model is great for static pages. Lots of them.

But while it may be a great service for a porn server, it is only OK for serving stuff that gets built on the fly, or gets rebuilt often.

Why do I stick? It's cheap, fairly reliable, friendly, cheap, and I can't face the switching costs (especially the time & energy). Also, I have a separate managed dedicated server for work (not as cheap!) which performs very well, and I like having the same interface for everything I do.