Hosting [Suggestions?]

I wouldn't go with Dreamhost.

I had Dreamhost and, although the price-to-features ratio was and still is FUCKING EXCELLENT, the downtime made it not-so-worthwhile for me. With Dreamhost, if it wasn't one thing malfunctioning, it was another. Sometimes I couldn't connect to my FTP. Sometimes MySQL wasn't working. Sometimes I couldn't access my admin panel. Just lots of little things that just frustrated me. My Ruby on Rails blog especially was always suffering from 500 errors. This was, apparently, a flaw in the programming of the application. Dreamhost's solution was to "remove all the bugs from your application". Which is to imply that there's such thing as software without bugs, which there is not. Certainly a small bug should cause my blog to malfunction temporarily; but I would experience up to an hour of downtime because Dreamhost didn't have Ruby on Rails setup properly. There was no bug in the application that should have been so debilitating; it was just the buildup of lots of tiny bugs that would eventually cause a forced shutdown of Ruby processes that would leave my blog on the ground for an hour or more.

Then one day I googled for "Dreamhost sucks", just out of curiosity. I found out some things.

I guess it depends on your site. Is uptime important to you? Will you get so few hits that it won't matter? Or do you expect lots of activity? How much money do you have to spend, monthly?

But by all means, feel free to go ahead and try out Dreamhost. You have 90+ days to see how much they suck, if at all. Just be careful not to use your free domain registration in that period, as they don't refund that "free" item if you cancel your hosting.

I keep hearing people talk about how awesome Dreamhost is, but I haven't seen it at all. Dreamhost oversells, which is fine. All hosts should oversell. It would be dumb for the streets to be x-million lanes wide just because that's how many cars are in existence. But if I had to guess, Dreamhost oversells too hard.

If you want me to suggest and alternative host; I'm not sure if I can. I'm still looking. I'm trying to find that balance between features, reliability, and price. Right now, the host I have my eyes on is Site5, but I had to choose them over other potential hosts because I need adequate Ruby on Rails support.

How ya doing, buddy?