JaypeeOnline // Blogging News & Reviews

Goodbye Dreamhost, Hello MediaTemple!

It took around 24 hours for the new nameservers to be resolved. Finally, JaypeeOnline is in its new home MediaTemple. For those of you who are new here or don't know who my previous web host is, I moved JaypeeOnline to Dreamhost almost a year ago. I know some of you are waiting for this post. So why the move? My overall experience with DreamHost wasn't that bad but it could've been better. I'll be sharing with you some of the things that lead me to decide to move and switch to another web host. The first few weeks that I was with DreamHost, I already experienced several downtimes that lasted for more than a couple of hours. I was still fortunate because I found out from other bloggers that other clients experienced downtimes that lasted from a couple of days to a week! After a couple of months, uptime was okay and more stable. One time, I was installing a WordPress plugin when all of a sudden I got a "Fatal error" message. At first I thought it was caused by the plugin so I deactivated it but that didn't fix the problem. After sending a support ticket I found out from the customer support that DreamHost upgraded their PHP installation. It would have helped if they notified clients and warned them about it but they didn't. Their reason was they didn't want clients to panic. This didn't happen only once but several times while I was with them. Hosting providers should notify their clients whenever they are fixing or upgrading something especially if it can directly affect the client's website or blog. Several times I got a "505 Internal Server Error" on which I would immediately send out a support ticket each time. During one of these occassions, I found out from the customer support's reply that there was a security breach over at DreamHost and around 3,500 separate FTP account passwords were accessed by hackers. The hacking incident, although it was a major issue it was still an isolated case. Most of the time that I got the "505 Internal Server Error" was because of abusive users in the cluster or a high load in the servers.

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