Dreamhost, kindly respond to Andy!

Categories: FeedbackPosted on September 27th, 2006

I’ve been hearing from friend Andy about his nightmares with Dreamhost (in fact I’m a customer too, partly due to his recommendations). He manages multiple websites and they’ve been shut down today. Andy doesn’t believe he’s at fault, and is asking for a dialogue with Dreamhost, and now they’ve clammed up.

Having worked closely with Andy for some time, I highly suspect that he’s pretty careful about how he manages his websites, and I suspect this is a simple misunderstanding. I hate having to do this to a company, but I really want to encourage a conversations between Andy and Dreamhost.

Folks, imagine if your blog or websites was taken down, locked, and they refused to talk to you, how would you feel?

Dreamhost friends, please respond to Andy, it’s really an appropriate professional courtesy, thanks in advance!

Update:

Julio Garcia has given his thoughts about Dreamhost.
AUinteractive talks about their experience being Dugg’d with Dreamhost
A different Andy did not buy Dreamhost due to these blogs
Robert Scoble talks about Dreamhost,

He suggests one way to learn about a product is to do a Google Search using the terms “Sucks”. Here’s the query for Dreamhost. wow.

Brian Stephens has blogged about this as well

Brian has an interesting solution to how this could be resolved in the future -data backup

Big Update:

Apparently Dreamhost has contacted Andy and will be restoring service. !!!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Feedback. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thanks for the link Jeremiah. If anyone can initiate conversations, it’s you.

Posted by Andy on September 27th, 2006 at 10:16 pm

Check out DreamHost blog at blog.dreamhost.com. In the past I wrote about lesson learnt from infrastructure disasters at DreamHost. Its seems like they ran in to more issues recently and covered them on their blog.

Posted by Anil Gupta on September 27th, 2006 at 10:51 pm

The most frustating thing is there no one to call and it feels like an email address that falls into the ether.

Posted by hollyster on September 27th, 2006 at 11:24 pm

Anil, I am aware of those problems and completely understand them. But this is an issue that is directly affecting me. They choose to suspend my account (which hosts many domains and over 100GB of data) with out any real reason and now they seem to refuse to communicate with me any further.

hollyster, yes!, that is incredibly frustrating. Having an email-only contact policy for a web hosting company is no way to run a business.

Posted by Andy on September 27th, 2006 at 11:46 pm

[...] There a couple reasons why this ticks me off. The first is that I recommended DreamHost to Andy, I told him that aside from some email issues in September 2005, everything was great. I also recommended DreamHost to Jeremiah Owyang and now he’s not too found of DreamHost either (he’s even asked them to respond to Andy). So, basically, thanks to the DreamHost jerks, I’ve lost some credibility. The other reason is that DreamHost is always quick to ask for a second chance time and time again when things go wrong, yet they don’t even give a customer the respect of a full response or explanation, let alone a second chance. Nor do they even provide a phone number, just a voicemail which they pick the best messages off of to post on their blog to laugh at. [...]

Posted by Julio Garcia - Web Technology, Movies, Sports, Life in San Jose, and more - » Blog Archive » Looking to Move from DreamHost on September 28th, 2006 at 12:24 am

[...] Anyway, he came to a presentation I gave to a few people this morning. Afterward he came up and explained how Dreamhost was screwing a friend of his and is totally non-responsive. He wrote it up on his blog. [...]

Posted by Dreamhost getting sucky PR out on blogs « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger on September 28th, 2006 at 11:32 am

I think it’s unrealistic to expect good phone customer service when you are paying such incredibly cheap rates for an amazing amount of features.

What dreamhost should do is offer a “gold” package for an extra monthly fee for people who feel the need to have a live person available for immediate assistance.

Posted by Jesse on September 28th, 2006 at 12:11 pm

First off, I like Scoble. He entertains me.

Now, with that said, do a google search for “Scoble sucks”

My god. He’s worse then Dreamhost

Doing my vanity sucks search results in even more, but unfortunately they are all for other Mike Miller’s.

Good luck getting that resolved, Andy.

Posted by Mike on September 28th, 2006 at 12:29 pm

Mike

I just did the query “Scoble Sucks” most of them that come up are him talking about something ELSE sucking, or people that are just saying it to get on ‘techmeme’.

I know Robert pretty well, you can tell him he sucks, and as long as you tell him why, he’ll probally blog about it.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on September 28th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

I’m not picking on Robert. I like Robert. I just think it’s funny the number of hits you can get from google on something like that.

Posted by Mike on September 28th, 2006 at 12:37 pm

Heh no worries, Robert is very good natured. He took so much heat as the “Face of Microsoft” he can take just about anything.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on September 28th, 2006 at 2:24 pm

[...] Then the blogosphere erupted, moaning about the appalling level of service provided by Dreamhost - downtime, poor support, bad communication, slow connectivity, veiled threats, termination without due cause. [...]

Posted by the fickle hand of fate « Andy C on September 28th, 2006 at 3:10 pm

Posted by Blog in isolation :: the fickle hand of fate on September 28th, 2006 at 8:00 pm

http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22dreamhost+sucks%22&word2=%22scoble+sucks%22

“scoble sucks” 74 results
“dreamhost sucks” 24600 results

No contest.

Posted by Chris Hajer on September 29th, 2006 at 12:14 am

Chris, thanks

I left your comment and URL to Google fight on Scoble’s blog and credited you

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/09/28/dreamhost-getting-sucky-pr-out-on-blogs/

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on September 29th, 2006 at 6:28 am

[...] Andy has gotten some human responses, so hopefully this will all be resolved. Several folks blogged about it, such as myself, Julio, and Brian. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Dreamhost Talks to Andy and the Blogosphere Reacts on September 29th, 2006 at 6:33 am

Jeremiah,

I am sorry to hear that your friend is having such a tough time with hosting. We (The Web 2.0 Show podcast guys) run a hosting business and we would like to invite both you and Andy to give it a try (two months free). We would like to also offer a 10% discount to all your blog readers, they can just use the discount code “switch” when they sign up.

We try to keep a very human feel to our hosting, we use IM and campfire to allow real time chat with customers. We don’t really spend money on advertising because we feel the dollars a customer spends with us should improve the services we provide them. We are very much a fan of “Creating passionate users” :). You can read more on our ideas at our blog.

Posted by Josh Owens on September 29th, 2006 at 8:43 am

guys, you should look at SiteGround. compared to that one, Dreamhost is heaven and has an ultra-friendly customer service. i mean it.

Posted by Olia on September 30th, 2006 at 1:11 am

Posted by Andy C :: the fickle hand of fate on October 2nd, 2006 at 6:29 am

Dreamhost Sucks At Hosting…

I’ve concluded that Dreamhost sucks phenomenally at hosting websites that generate any kind of traffic. Sure, their $9.99 a month plans with massive savings coupons are enticing, but if you knew what you were getting yourself into, you’d s…

Posted by Elliott Back on May 3rd, 2007 at 6:17 pm

[...] ResearchSearching around on the net this morn has uncovered many many many many other blog posts about similar experiences as mine. From deceptive business [...]

Posted by Fed Up With Dreamhost: Horrible Hosting Company on April 28th, 2008 at 8:45 am

[...] Dreamhost, kindly respond to Andy! [...]

Posted by Reddit’ing My Site can CRASH Servers at Dreamhost | Stefan Didak's Rambling on September 21st, 2008 at 7:38 am

[...] two days earlier. Maybe Yorkshire folk aren’t so mean, after all.Then the blogosphere erupted, moaning about the appalling level of service provided by Dreamhost - downtime, poor support, bad [...]

Posted by the fickle hand of fate - Blog in isolation on November 28th, 2008 at 5:17 am