July 2009

Not so long ago, I encountered some technical issues with my hosting provider, DreamHost. The specific server hosting Pulpconnection failed whereupon DreamHost replaced the shared machine. But then things went crazy. Services would fail giving 500 Internal Errors.

Fortunately, one smart cookie, Ryan Kanno, helped troubleshoot the issue. Unfortunately we didn’t find the exact cause of the problem, but Ryan eliminated a lot of possibilities of the potential fault. As a temporary workaround, he suggested I look into dedicated versus shared hosting. That’s where DreamHost’s PS plan came into play.

With a DreamHost Virtual Private Server, you get your own virtual server with protected memory and resources which results in better stability and performance. Nothing sucks like having a down site with all the search engines starting to forget your existence.

The first week of DreamHost PS is free so you can try it out at no risk. One complaint I do have is the time it took for my move to a private server. I submitted my request for PS on a Thursday but didn’t get moved until the following Monday. That’s a long time to upgrade to a “premium” service.

Once my sites were moved to the private server, things felt zippier overall, but don’t expect significant speed increases. We’re going for stability here. That’s when I encountered a second faux pax with my PS move. Although all my files were properly transferred, not all my DNS records were updated so one site would no longer resolve. That entailed another support ticket with DreamHost for resolution. Luckily, that was fixed overnight.

Tech support with DreamHost is kind of hit or miss. I must admit that tech support gets back to you quickly and very courteously. But the resolution of your issue is dependent on the skill level of the customer support agent you get. My original problem went to two different techs. The first helped describe the problem with suggested fixes. The second tech saw a misconfiguration of the server (which I couldn’t see or fix) and made things right. And like I said with the non-updated DNS records, the tech fixed the problem in one shot.

As a premium service, DreamHost PS does cost more. How much more? It depends. Your starting cost is $1/month for each 10 MB of memory, and the smallest memory allocation possible is 150 MB (so $15 per month). That’s in addition to other DreamHost costs you already pay. You can also get a DreamHost PS for MySQL for increased database performance, but this is yet another additional cost. I opted to start small with a standard PS only for web serving and keeping my original (shared) database server.

During the first week trial, your PS is given a whopping 2300 MB of RAM! Keep that and you’re paying $230 extra per month! But to protect you from escalating costs, DreamHost is cool and analyzes your usage over the trial week and automatically sets your RAM. While I love to dream that Pulpconnection is on everyone’s daily read list and I need to allocate plenty of resources to serve up the pulp, I know it ain’t true. So I’m sticking with the recommended allocation of 150 MB of RAM for all my sites. My bill will now be $15 more per month.

Is DreamHost PS worth it? Well, fortunately, I do have corporate sponsorship so the value of paying $15 extra per month is a minimal investment to ensure better site uptime. If I didn’t have this extra finances, I’d stick with a typical shared server and rely on tech support from DreamHost to resolve my original issue.