I was looking for Ruby on Rails hosting and found this amazing offer from DreamHost. This is just unbelievable. Consider this:
- Disk Storage at signup - 178.5 GB, automatically increases weekly by 1 GB
- Monthly Bandwidth at signup - 1.785 TB, automatically increases weekly by 16 GB
- MySQL Databases: unlimited
- E-Mail Accounts (POP/IMAP) - 3,000
- 1 free domain name
- Domains Hosted - unlimited
- Full Unix Shell
- Ruby On Rails
- CVS Repository
- Subversion Repository (SVN)
- SSH access
- WebDAV, Frontpage, Streaming
- 97-day money-back guarantee
- Host reliably with 18th-ranked web host in the world (442,285 domains hosted).
- More and more and more...
These guys are like gmail in web hosting - they talk hundreds gigabytes of space and terabytes of bandwidth.
And for this "oh my freaking God" hosting plan they want $9.95/mo only (or even $7.95 if you subscribe for 2 years). But wait, google for "Dreamhost" and you can find promo codes like "mddr" or "FLY", which give you $97 discount for the first year.
Bottom line - you have to pay only $22.40 for the whole first year.
Cool. I want this. Fuck Windows hosting, go Linux and Ruby :)
Where is the catch, anybody?
Update. Ok, here comes the tricky part. "DreamHost Web Hosting does not accept payments from Israel". Really weird. What's wrong with payments from Israel? Oh well, happily I have US card too.
The reviews of DreamHost aren't that good when used for Rails hosting. I would suggest anybody looking for a good Rails hosting company to check out Rails Hosting Info - http://www.railshostinginfo.com, a site where you can easily compare many Rails hosts. I would also like to ask everyone to post a comment about his/her experience with any of these hosts, which makes it easier for others to find a good home for their Rails projects.
It's a reasonable price, so long as you're only concerned about storage and bandwidth, and aren't bothered by having your website shut off if it gets too busy, for "cpu/resource abuse" -- a mystery figure that is never explained in the TOS. That's the worst that can happen, then you're at the mercy of Dreamhost's infamous days-on-end support responses.
If you want a fast, reliable website with responsive support just in case you ever need it, with a SLA instead of mystery processor-cycle allocation formulae, then you're looking in the wrong place. You can find such quality at the same price level, but only from companies with realistic service offerings.
Ask yourself just how much storage and bandwidth you actually need, then find the best service you can afford to service that actual need. Instead of speculating about how much money you stand to save if you ever have a terabyte of data you happen to need hosted.
If your site does get that successful, you most likely are making enough money from it that it costs you more to have three days of downtime, waaaay more, than you saved by skimping on hosting fees.
I speak as a former DreamHost customer, btw. After a couple of years with DH the repeated downtime, slow websites, impossibly slow control panel, horror stories from other customers and nobody-home support (although once escalated to higher levels, those guys do know their stuff) it turned out not to be worth half of what I was paying, so I decided to pay twice as much instead for what on paper appears to be a fraction of the offering.
I've been with canadawebhosting.com for almost four years now. No downtime. I once had a sync problem with my cluster's filesystem, they offered a partial refund without even asking, despite the fact it hadn't violated their SLA. My site is always fast, and this is not likely to change if it gets a lot busier. I can keep sftp and ssh sessions active for months. The servers aren't oversold, so I have all the processing power I need when I need it. I'll take quality over quantity any day.
Well, nobody is using Gmail 2Gb space either, that's a trick of course, but seriously how can they own me? The worst what might happen - second year I have to pay full 9.95/mo (or 7.95 if sign for two years).
That's a reasonable price for such huge hosting plan I think.
There is a secret limit as to "how much CPU" you can use. Of course, they (and all other budget webhosts) won't tell you what that limit is, and of course you can't measure it. If your site gets too popular, I guarantee you it will be shut down for "overutizliation of resources". This will happen with little or no notice, when you contact the budget host about the shutdown the response will always be to upsell you into a more expensive plan.
That's the catch -- you can never _use_ all the bandwidth you're being sold.
The catch is that they are lying to you.
If you were to buy a plane ticket and find out when you get there that they sold you that ticket with the expectation that you wouldn't use it, wouldn't you be mad?
I know I would be. Look for a host that provides you what you need.
The catch is that they know that the big majority of their users never actually use all the provided space. So they attract people on big numbers but neglect the rest of the service.
It's a bit like buying a computer solely based on of its component.
What do you think? That they offer all of this without owning you at some point?