Ben
Ben is a lifelong Nintendo fan who likes to build websites, and make video games. He buys way too much Lego.
Cheapo Hosting
I got to talking to some friends at work and they couldn’t believe how cheap my hosting is, and how many features it has. I’m with Dreamhost and, whilst it’s far from perfect, it’s incredibly good value for money. I use the level 3 plan and get 60gig of hard disk space, and 1.6terabyts (thats 1600 gigabytes) of bandwidth – for the less technically inclined amongst you that’s quite a lot.
Anyway I told my friends I’d set up a promo code so they can get a discount – and that’s what I’ve done. I was reliably told by one of these friends that I would be a moron if I didn’t take any of the refferal money for myself so I have – but not much.
Buy any of the year or two year plans from Dreamhost, enter the code totebo and you will save $77 from the price (… i’ll make $20 🙂 ) – there’s also a bit of a saving on the monthly plans but you will only sve from the first month so I’d go for the yearly if I were you.
So if you’re interested click away.
Update : Ok – when my friend who was interested in the package read the post he picked up on the ‘it’s far from perfect’ thing, so I feel I should clarify it. Recently Dreamhost has had a few spurts of downtime, that is – time when the site hasn’t been accessible. However these are rarely for very long and, if you’ve set the relevant settings in your control panel, they send you an email explaining what has happened and why – so in a way these are positive things… kinda. The only other problem is they seem quite trigger happy on the processor limitations but unless you’re creating a massively dynamic website (lots of php and database stuff) then you won’t have any problems (I haven’t).
I’m on Dreamhost too, and in general, I’ve been very happy with their service. As you say, they aren’t perfect; however, the service they do provide for the price is exceptional. Because I run a personal site, I can tolerate the downtime (which I don’t usually even find out about until after the fact). I’ve had one instance where the creation of an SQL database took nearly 24 hours, but it was an isolated incident and hasn’t happened since. For me, the ability to have unlimited subdomains, databases, disk space and bandwidth that grow as time passes, unlimited user/shell/ftp accounts, Rails capability, etc generally outweighs the few growing pains that they run into. For the most part, the customer service has been excellent as well.
Dreamhost Rails capability is maybe possible if you are an ubergeek. It’s not available out of the box. Step-by-step instructions on getting it running are not available. You gotta be warmly conversant with Apache/FastCGI.
Jena- I agree entirely. I didn’t want to make out they’re perfect, but for the features and support alone I’d say they’re worth the money.
Gene – I was under the impression that Rails was now installed by default (I know it wasn’t for a while). They have a fairly complete looking page about it on the wiki, although to tell the truth it’s not something I’m interested in so haven’t spent much (any) time looking at it.