I'm a dreamhoster

So far so good. I finally got access yesterday after days of trying to sort out some problems with payment. Google Checkout is still too picky to accept my credit cards, and to pay directly you have to fax dreamhost an approval to charge your card. So I had to print out their PDF form, fill it in, rub a crayon against the form with my card under it, scan it on a Windoze PC (I'm lucky to have people in my family still using it, or you can say I'm unlucky enough to have enough patience to get any of my scanners to work with FreeBSD), transfer back to my PC, enhace the rubbing in GIMP, recompress and export it back to raster PDF and fax it via a trial account at fax1.com (I only learned about TPC fax service later).

A few days later they processed my fax and approved me to pay directly, but also reset my account so I lost the $50 discount I got by using one of those promo codes. Reluctant to pay the full $119.40, I had to go back to support and spend another couple of days trying to convince them that I'm entitled to the discount. Apparently they didn't care what promo code I used during the signup process, so they gave me the full $97 discount (robbing some poor soul of $47, but in my favor) and I got a full year of their most basic hosting plan (200Gb space, 2Tb transfer and a nice pack of features) for just $22.40.

I'm not that greedy, so I donated $50 to MIT OpenCourseWare through my Dreamhost account - which they matched to a nice total of $100.

What's wrong with Dreamhost

You can get so many results for "dreamhost sucks" in any search engine that it rightfully makes you wonder - what can be possibly so wrong with it so as to provoke such mass hatred. The fact is, dreamhost is provokes much more love and affection than disgust, but as it often happens, bad news is the more popular one.

I chose dreamhost because I don't require 99.99% uptime. I'm quite content with next-business day replies to my support inquiries and I'm not easily aggravated with most annoying bugs and quirks. I guess my life in the Open Source community has taught me not to expect much from people and be understanding about any problems.

As far as I can tell from my immediate and very short-lived experience, the most impeding thing about the whole web-hosting industry for me is web-based control. One of the reasons I need hosting in the first place is e-mail. My primary MUA is Gmail right now and one thing I learned using it is web-based interfaces can only go so far. They don't grow with you. They make choices for you, most of which are fine for a starter, but get more and more annoying once you get the hold of whatever technology you're using through a web-interface.

So I decided I need a good IMAP server. Apart from the usual nine yards of e-mail services, I want to streamline the process of importing the archives of any mailing list I want to subscribe to - in order to centralize the info I want to search through all in one place. I still have to discover how well Dreamhost will handle a dozen gigabytes of plain text messages, though.

Control panel

And I end up with the Dreamhost proprietary control panel, which is roughly in the same bucket with cPanel and a hundred of other web-hosting-for-dummies solutions. You know you can host unlimited domains and subdomains with Dreamhost? Even if you do, what you don't know is that you'll probably never get through the first hundred of them. You'll get too tired of pointing and clicking and clicking and pointing and... With only two fully-hosted domains I already yawned scrolling through the pages, enabling some basic functions I needed.

And all for what? To make life easier for somebody who doesn't know a thing about hosting? Or to give you hell of an experience if you know your way around but don't appreciate an eye-candied half-AJAXed interface getting into your way through a not-so-fast https service backed by a not-that-fast php interpreter.

DNS

You have to delegate the (sub)domains you want to host with Dreamhost to them. I understand they've got many servers and IP subnets and may need to change them often, but why not just give me (www|mx|ftp|ssh|whatever).mylogin.dreamhost.com cnames and save me from the pain of importing my zone files through their super-feature-full DNS administration interface one record at a time.

All in all, I'm satisfied, but they could do better if you ask me. I'll probably be updating this page with my experiences as a dreamhoster.