I have had my problems with hosting providers and have bounced around to a few different ones. Initially my goal was to go cheap. However I eventually wised up and settled with Media Temple. However I still have a few sites on a Dreamhost Shared Hosting Plan.
Why Dreamhost? Well… in the Shared Hosting world they had a lot of rave reviews. However, after being with them for over two years now I am seriously considering ditching them all together and migrating everything to Media Temple.
Let’s talk about why.
First, the main site I had with them has already been moved to Media Temple because it is “uptime” sensitive and I found that it constantly was going down because of their poor infrastructure and overly packed hosts. Any answer you try to get from support on these issues is worthless. They will almost always take over one business day to respond to any inquiry for a shared hosting plan and rarely will they actually provide any valuable help.
I get it, shared hosting folks aren’t always the most technically savvy but c’mon, at least make some effort. Especially when it takes you 24 – 48 hours to respond.
Today though was the pile of cinder blocks that broke the camel’s back. Two days ago… yes TWO DAYS… I sent a request asking about HOW to go about re-keying a certificate I had purchased through them. A relatively simple task for most hosts. Notice my emphasis on “how”. I didn’t ask them to do ANYTHING for me at this point.
The response I got back (which I wasn’t able to check until 11 hours after I received it due to my work and it coming to my personal email) was that they had gone ahead and REVOKED my current certificate. Didn’t ask, they just did. Told me to order a new one.
It was obvious the neanderthal on the other end of the support ticket didn’t even bother to read my email. My guess is they have gotten a lot of similar requests lately and he just hit “cut and paste” and send and the proceeded to revoke. They obviously have ZERO CHANGE CONTROL procedures. Honestly, are they operating out of someone’s basement? Probably… considering how often my site went down in the past 2 years with no notice.
Anyhow, after roughly 12 hours of down time my site is now alive again and well. Partly it is my own fault for a.) not staying on top of my email and b.) having kept any of my business with them.
Having moved all of my hosting to MT, I must say I am much much happier. They may cost more, but they are well worth it. Media Temple support is incredible, on even their lowest plans you can get someone on live chat usually within 10 minutes if not instantly and generally speaking my experience has been good. The majority of their support staff is knowledgeable and strives to be helpful.
I don’t have a recommendation link here or anything like that. This is just my unadulterated plug to tell you to use Media Temple as a host and to ditch Dream Host if you currently use them.
End Rant…