As if Dreamhost’s well-publicized problems during the last three weeks of July weren’t enough to frustrate a shared web hosting customer such as myself, with a single humble domain hosting a couple of lightly-used blogs and a photo gallery, lately my shared hosting server, happy.dreamhost.com, has been sluggish at best, and frequently just dead to the world. I’ll share a few statistics that are probably interesting to no one but me, and maybe the few other people who read or use the web services on auroralux.net:
Longest uptime I can remember for Happy in the last several days: 14 hours
Highest load average I’ve seen in the last 24 hours: 650
Number of support emails sent to Dreamhost: 5
Number of responses: 3
Number of responses with helpful information on my problem: 1
It’s a very interesting time for me to have these problems with my web hosting provider, since I’m just under three weeks shy of my annual renewal date. I figure it’ll take a good 48 hours for domain name services to propogate, and I’ll probably double that for good measure, so I at least know I have several more days before I really have to decide whether to renew with them. The biggest advantage I have is my hosting needs are fairly lightweight, so I could host this site pretty much anywhere.
I’ve been researching web hosting in general and some specific ones that seem well-regarded, and now question Dreamhost’s policy of providing a very cheap shared web hosting solution with high disk space and bandwidth limits. The bottleneck isn’t the bandwidth or disk in this case it’s the CPU.
Say for example the front page of my blog consists of 21 kilobytes of data, a conservative estimate. In order to use up my current bandwidth limit of 1317 gigabytes per month, I’d have to have 62,717,272 page views on my blog per month. Looks great! I doubt I’ll ever receive that many page views unless I have the misfortune to be slashdotted. I’d need 24 page views per second on my home page to use up the available bandwidth on my website. Wow!
Dreamhost is very vague about CPU resource utilization on their shared hosts, and I don’t know how many other customers I share happy.dreamhost.com with, but I’m confident that if my website were serving 24 page views per second, I would be adversely affecting the performance of the shared server, so the high bandwidth limit LOOKS like a great deal, but the type of website I host is unlikely to ever be able to use it without grinding the poor shared server to a halt, a scenario that looks suspiciously like what’s happening right now on happy!