Hosting Review Payola

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.

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One Response to Hosting Review Payola

  1. You do so because you are not satisfied with the service. It’s ok for us human beings. But As you correctly noticed you can’t afford a change. But still you can inform others about the service quality.

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