Comments on: send in the gerbils

By: Linoge

Linoge — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:11:29 +0000

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.

By: Bitter

Bitter — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:04:28 +0000

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.