This post will serve as a fair warning to both of my regular readers: this weblog may encounter sporadic/permanent downtimes in the immediate/near/far future. And, yup, that is about as specific as I can get.
The short story is that my webhost, Dreamhost, is upgrading their servers, and trying to migrate to them in relatively short order. Granted, I do not really care about the whole “green” aspect of the upgrade, but who can blame them for wanting to have more stable servers that perform better and yet cost less than their original hardware? Hell, those are most of the reasons I like and buy fluorescent bulbs.
Well, everyone is going to be shunted over to the new servers in the next year or so, but they were looking for “early adopter” gerb… er… “volunteers” to go ahead and get moved. They did not really provide a comprehensive explanation as to why they need those volunteers, but something tells me that, if something goes wrong with the migration, we will be the first to know (and hopefully be able to help fix it, if only through our error logs or other such information).
Yup, I said “we” – I volunteered to be a happy, go-lucky… volunteer. Why? Well, partially because I know the corner of the interwebs that I have carved out for myself is hardly important, and few people will miss it if it starts doing a drunken tango across the internet. And, partially (well, mostly) because Dreamhost offered free unlimited bandwidth and disk quotas if I volunteered. Free. Unlimited. For as long as I have an account with them. Now, if you check out the site I just linked to, there are a few caveats, but they are relatively normal, straightforward things, and basically boil down to do not “try and run free porn affiliate sites or anime video trading forums or host pirated rips of The Dark Knight on DreamHost”, to quote them. I think I can probably work with those restrictions.
So, I have no idea when this migration will take place, but it will be at some point in the next year. Bear with me if things suddenly get whacky ’round these parts.
Oh, and if you are a Dreamhost customer too (and given my positive experiences with them, if you are not, you should be), head on over to the Billing Accounts section of your control panel, and take a look at the offer yourself. You, too, can be a gerbi… volunteer!
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pardon the dust | gimme your money! | ker-*splat* |
I use Dreamhost, but I’ve had enough problems with them that I don’t recommend them to anyone just signing up for service. Just the other day, their mail server I’m on went down and I put in a highest priority ticket. It took more than 24 hours to get a response. And I was one of the people hit with the billing error to the tune of $7.5 million total. I also got stuck on crappy servers for the first year, until I demanded a server with a customer who I knew had a much more stable site. I finally got it and only had to be moved once when one of those users got wacky and ate up all the resources.
However, that wasn’t the point of my comment.
I hope they take volunteers through December. Because of the EVC site I host for Sebastian, I don’t want to risk going down right before or right after the election. However, I’m willing to get moved if it means faster response times when something does happen.
Granted, the unlimited promise doesn’t entice me because as a 2+ year customer, I practically have unlimited use anyway. Not even when the top blogs were linking directly to one of my 1+MB files did I get anywhere near my limits. It’s all about the idea of (hopefully) faster response if something does go wrong since they want to get it done and tested quickly.
Wow. Entirely different experiences than me. Up until a few months back, my relationship with Dreamcast… well, there was not one. They took my money and gave me problem-free hosting. Then, a few months ago, the wiki I host decided to not play well with Google, and I spiked my server’s load capacity (I hope I am not the user to whom you are referring…). They worked with me to find a solution, and while all of the efforts were overshadowed by the, “If we cannot find an answer, we will stick you on a private server and charge you megabucks,” threat, they were pretty helpful and polite.
That said, their service at your end, especially with the billing error, seems rather… crappy, to put it mildly. I guess I dodged those bullets.
I can fully understand waiting to be a volunteer. I have no idea how many people will actually take the opportunity, or how long it will be open (the latter is probably a function of the former), but you are right in any case – the extra space is more or less meaningless. I have had an account with them for almost 3 years now, and I have never come anywhere near their constantly-growing disk or bandwidth caps. Still, “unlimited” is kind of cool to say, and hopefully the service attention will go up accordingly as well, should I ever need it.