I once made a 3rd party picture section for Digg (digpicz.com (see also reddit pics :)), and the shared hosting for $9.95 a month handled 100′000 (hundred thousand!!!) visitors the first day!

I blogged what I optimized to handle such a traffic on a cheap shared host in this post: A few words about Digpicz.com.

1) do not use any image magick commands
2) get less than 1000/pageloads per day

if you use image magick commands, they will claim your going over CPU seconds alotted, with their fake made up CPU seconds metric that they invented, and shut off your site without notice.

if you get more than 1000/page loads a day, you are most likely going to get a random shut down of your site.

and they dont give a cr4p if your losing adsense during the shutdown.

If it was sooo extreemely lifesavingly important for your site to have five nine reliability then you’d pay for it by going to a corporate host (that’ll be a half million dollars a year).

Personally, I’d *want* dreamhost to shut my site down. If my site is producing a million mails that a) are wasting everyone’s time, and b) are adding me to a load of spam blacklists, then I’d take the hit.

Not to mention that in lots of countires DH would be breaking the law by not shutting it down.

This hosting may use people who don’t have any script running on web site and don’t matter when working and when not…

My blog (optimiced.com) works fine, and up to now was down just a couple of times, in a whole year!

Support was OK. Billing was OK. Emails and server uptime was fairly OK.

And, yes, you must take care of your own installs of blogging software and other things!

What you should do then is ask them to send you the WordPress file, which was eploited, after it was modified by the exploit, and then re-send it to WordPress.org forum. You could ask help in wordpress.org forums, anyway. You should ask DreamHost guys to look into raw log files and help you find how the file was hacked…

Yeah, maybe they were not so helpful, but you also don’t have the right to blame DreamHost from stopping a malicious script executing freely on their servers, right?

Hope everything’s fine now… and, yes, I still like DH and recommend them, and not only because I can get 10% referral discount for referring clients to them!

downtown seems to have good reputation amongst them and their offers also seem more down to earth and realistic compared to the rates I’d be paying. Anybody here recommends downtown? I’m new to this whole web hosting thing and would need a reliable shared hosting service to put up my demoreel for potential employers.

i got my web also in media temple, and they’re also really nice. at least these 2 companies are much much better than some company i hosted my site before.

Now instead of only going down on Fridays, our server is down probably about 3 out of the 5 days of the week. We work strictly from 9-5 and with the server going down that puts us out a lot of money (one of our main sources of communication is email.) For example: we opened our office at 9AM today (eastern time) and here it is 1PM and the email is still down. We are not able to send or receive email in or out of the company all together.

All in all we will be switching soon but I wanted to let you know there are better companies out there. Before you settle with DreamHost I highly encourage you to look elsewhere beforehand.

That said, I’ll probably pass up on Dreamhost in spite of posts (14 -1 which were just babies crying without telling you they have damp diapers (no explanation).

Has anyone had any experience with Ultra Website Hosting? I haven’t seen any bad comments about them and they’ve answered my initial queries about their service rapidly. The only heartburn is that they don’t equate “domain” with “website” (as many don’t) when telling you how many sites you can host. Now, this is correct, but many others go the other way and it’s confusing.

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com