Could someone with a Dreamhost account please PM me an "ls -al" of their home directory please.

I am having issues because some directory ownership and permissions have got screwed up (coincidentally it happened at the exact same time as the last spunky filer issues). I'd quite like to see what the ownership/permissions are supposed to look like.

My ".ssh" directory also vanished at the same time, which Dreamhost are blaming on me having a relatively weak password with just alpha characters in it.

If no one has responded by Thursday night I should be home by 11pm and able to gain access to mine - best send me a reminder late Thursday as I'm pretty maxed out in London this week.

Sent you a PM.

Thank you. Got bored waiting for Dreamhosts to fix it, managed to fix it by toggling enhanced ssh security on and off on the web panel.

My Wordpress installs got compromised and I guess things got screwed up by the attacker.

Glad it's resolved. Their support is pretty dreadful, but I guess you get what you pay for.

I'm still dissatisfied with them as a web host, but haven't found anything better that gives me enough disk space. It appears you need to choose between cheap ($5-$10/mo) plans that are way oversold, or more expensive plans with lower limits on storage/disk usage that you can actually use (a few GB at most.)

I haven't seen anything approaching a middle ground in this regard, but as soon as I do, I'm jumping on it.

Like I said, Bluehost gives you that much disk space, and they have a 24-hour help line. I've used it several times and it's not just a promotional gimmick. Every time I've called I've talked to a person in under 10-15 minutes. I've even had to call in the middle of the night (around 2-3am) and gotten a person on the phone almost immediately. I can't speak highly enough for their customer support.

It's almost the exact opposite of Dreamhost: I've received a single "newsletter" since I joined, and their customer support is great. I do not miss those moronic Dreamhost newsletters.

Yeah, but I've read that Bluehost oversells just as much as Dreamhost and never lets you near their theoretical limits on disk and bandwidth. How much disk are you using?

The "give us your driver's license to get SSH access" thing creeps me out, too.

I'm definitely not using anywhere near my capacity. At first, that capacity was 300GB, but now it's something like 1.5TB.

It's a dollar more a month than Dreamhost, but they advertise as giving you 1.5TB of disk space and 15TB of bandwidth. My point being that at the very least, when Dreamhost is giving you crap for approaching their 500GB storage and 5TB bandwidth limits, I really can't see Bluehost giving you crap about it if it's only a third of what they advertise.

Naturally, all these guys hope you won't use as much as they promise, but I think you'll have a better experience with Bluehost.

Sorry, I don't know what to say about the driver's liscense thing. That's a little weird. I just checked the help FAQ and it appears that this is still a requirement...

They're apparently fine with any photo ID. Got an old college ID?

Showstopper. WTF do I know? they could be terrorists trying to forge my license and attack us!

Seriously, that is not doable. OK, when I take a Ferrari for a test drive, I submit to that, but an ISP?

I think Mark Lord mentioned https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

I have hardly put any strain on my accounts/domains there yet, but I like the pay-as-you-go model, my one email to tech support was actually answered, and it seems pretty straight up.

No SSL. Please do *not* tell me it is run by the Moonies.

The problem with www.nearlyfreespeech.net is:

"Disk Space (Storage): $0.01 per megabyte-month"

That would cost me $600 a month

I've set myself up a NFS account to test it out on one of the blogs I host. A few first impressions:

- things are a little quirky (such as having to choose a unique "short name" for a site, unique across all of NFS's users)
- every site gets it own ssh login, with a very long user name
- can't use A records to point at the site, only CNAMEs (their load balancing system means IP addresses will change)
- no cron, which is a pain for database backups, I'll have to code an php page to call each day before rsync'ing my backup

Performance seems to me more consistent than dreamhost, most blog pages are taking ~0.5 seconds to run, as opposed to 0.2-5 seconds on dreamhost.

That's something I forgot to mention. For some reason Dreamhost is really slow. Pages load much faster since I switched.

I meant to imply that this plan is good for mostly-text/blog, low-intensity consumers like me.

I put a couple of low-res family pictures up there, but then I tell my siblings that they have to order the DVD. Free shipping

I think I've finally found my life raft from the sinking ship of Dreamhost. The last straw was a billing mistake they made a few months ago that took several days of angry correspondence to correct, during which time they credited the wrong amount four times until they finally got it right. Stuff like this doesn't fill me with confidence, either.

So, my idea now is that, rather than trying to find a single web host that will do a good job hosting my sites and storing my backups, I've decided to do my web hosting and my network backups separately. This brings my disk space requirements for my web host down to 2-3GB, which makes a provider like CheapVPS (reviews here and here) look pretty good. I'm still looking around for more CheapVPS experiences before I make my decision, but they would seem to be a good fit for what I need on the hosting end. Anyone know anything about them, or any other affordable VPS providers? Another option that Bitt mentioned to me is gandi.net, but their hosting service is in beta, and I've read some negative reviews that suggest they're not ready for prime time. Still, I think they're worth keeping an eye on for those who don't have an immediate need.

For my backups, I think Amazon S3 is the winner. Using s3fs and Duplicity, I have a fast, easily-mountable network backup solution that will only cost me a few bucks a month. The oversold web hosts clearly don't have an interest in letting you use the disk space they quote you, so a pay-as-you-go storage service seems like the way to go.

I use Spry for my web hosting, and they've been good. They have an associated company, VPSLink which provides unmanaged VPS hosting.

I guess I still don't see the advantage, at least price-wise, to pay-as-you-use hosting/backups/whatever. Lets say I have 100GB of photos and home movies I want to store on Amazon's service. That's $15 a month right there, plus the $17 it costs simply to upload it.

I understand, I'm taking a risk with my web host that they won't like me using their site as a backup service, but until I hit that wall I'm going to save a good amount of money, and I can always switch to the new backup system when necessary.


Ah, heck, I'm starting to think that I'm just going to stick to backing everything up onto a spare hard drive and take it over to the parents' house once a week...

I guess some people like to have a viable solution that won't change every three months.

This is exactly what I do, except "parents' house" is "my desk drawer at work" and "once a week" is "once a month or so". Oh, and I alternate between two external disks, so that at least one of the backups is never in the same place as the computer.

When you do your backups do you just do a full system backup or is it just a few folders that you worry about?

I use a backup program of my own devising to copy the whole of my server to the external disk drive. It's not a full system backup, because some of the interesting files are locked. It couldn't be used for a system restore, for example. It includes all of the home directories from the server, all of the photos, movies and music, and anything else that isn't locked at the time.

I'm not too bothered if I lose the entire PC -- I'll just reinstall from scratch anyway. I am bothered if I lose the photos, etc., since SWMBO will not be amused.

My website is hosted on a VPS, which is backed up by my hosting company, but I use rdiff-backup to bring it all back to (a Linux VM on) my server once a day as well.

Yeah, that's what I'm planning.

However! I wanted to add an alternative for the people who are concerned primarily with backups. If you don't need a lot of web space, I could see getting one of those pay as you go plans, and then paying $5 a month to Mozy for, as they claim, "unlimited backup." I haven't found any asterisks so far, and they specifically mention photos, music, and essentially pst files. I'm not sure what would happen if I uploaded the uncompressed AVIs of my wedding video, but hey, they claim "unlimited."

At the moment I have the free 2GB plan to test it out, but it looks like a good service. The software is really simplistic, but it can automatically back up when it's detected an idle state for a user-specified amount of time. They also claim pretty high encryption, and you can specify your own encryption key.

The only issue I'm coming across at the moment is that I'm testing my first backup right now, just 327.5MB, and it's pretty slow. But I think that's because it's encrypting the data in chunks and then uploading it. Besides, this is an initial backup, so presumably in the future it'll go pretty quick.

*edit*

Shameless plug: there's a referral system on Mozy, so I'd really appreciate it if you'd use the link above when signing up, should you choose to do so. We both get 256MB more for doing so.

Yes Mozy is very good.


But (you knew there had to be a but coming didn't you) it is very slow to backup large amounts of data, at least it is from here in the UK. I signed up to their unlimited plan in November last year and set it backing up 90GB of data (photos/mp3s made up the bulk of it). It took just about six months to complete the first backup.

Admittedly I only run it for about 8 hours a day, but I still thought that was a little slow.

I have one other issue with it. You can choose to limit the bandwidth used at certain times of the day, but this is combined with the same functionality used to stop it running at all at some times of the day.

This means that if I want to constrain it to only run 1am - 9am (which I need to) I can't then restrict the amount of bandwidth it uses when it runs. That means that it happily uses all the upstream bandwidth when it runs, which makes any other TCP traffic between 1am - 9am run very slowly. Not a problem when you use the machine it is running on, as it notices you using it and slows down, more of a problem when using another machine on the network. It really needs a global, "never use more than this amount of bandwidth option".

I am fully expecting at some point that the unlimited side of it will become limited in some way. Things like this always do in the end.

I can definitely see that happening. From what I could see with a small amount of data, it was encoding a little, then uploading a little, and alternating back and forth like that. But for some reason it would occasionally be doing nothing, even though the machine was idling. I'm a little worried about what a backup of all my data is going to be like. It's too bad, because I really like how it works in theory...


I would be really surprised if they imposed a limit on their current customers, though. I can imagine a lot of people bailing if they suddenly went from "unlimited" to 100GB or something.


I still really like the service, but I'm going to have to test it a little more to see if it works for me.

I don't see why not, every single service I have ever been sold as unlimited had the terms and conditions changed on me later to make it limited. I understand why this happens, I just wish they'd be more realistic/upfront about it from the outset.

2 x "unlimited" broadband services, 1 x "unlimited" phone package, 1 x "unlimited" hosting package*

* ok, so not unlimited, but practically unlimited

I still don't see how ISPs can advertise "unlimited" broadband and then have teeny tiny text in the T&C to say that it really is limited.

Ironically one of the ISPs that sold me "unlimited" are now one of the clearest about not offering unlimited, I guess they finally learnt their lesson.

http://www.plus.net/unlimited_broadband/

I tried using Mozy for a while, but it was frequently telling me that it was uable to perform the backup and then it would never seem to try again until I manually kicked it off, and then the whole dance would start over again. YMMV.

One issue with it is that it needs to have three times the free space (on the drive with the system temp folder) as the largest file you want to backup. So if you have little free space on your system drive and large files on other drives it will repeatedly fail, with a cryptic message.

Thankfully there is a registry key to tell it to put it's temporary files elsewhere.

I tried it out and found it was really slow as well. I'd also have to keep checking that it actually backed up as well so in the end I went back to scheduled rsync.

Just a quick update. I ended up choosing Linode as my virtual private hosting provider, and am very pleased with the service so far. I've migrated all of my sites from Dreamhost to Linode and they are all running much faster. Linode's custom control panel is fantastic, and having full root control of the box is a nice luxury to have. I can do *anything* I want with the box. They give you a choice of 4 different data center locations (I chose New Jersey) and will even let you set their DNS servers up to do slave DNS for your domains.

The storage and RAM that comes with the cheapest plan is rather pedestrian (12GB storage, 360MB RAM) but are enough for what I'm doing, and I can always add extra if I need it. As I mentioned before, I no longer need massive amounts of storage on my hosting provider now that I'm using Amazon S3 for my backups (the cost for S3 so far has been about $1.50/mo.)

Dreamhost was only $11/mo, and I'm paying $22 now for my Linode and S3 accounts, but I think the extra cash is worth it. I now have a server I can do anything with, doesn't get bogged down due to overselling, and a backup solution that won't get taken away from me due to vague terms of service.

All in all I'm pleased with the new setup. Anyone else who's considering the VPS route will be well served by giving Linode a look.

I just had to share this. I haven't been a Dreamhost customer for a while now, but I still get those horrible newsletters. Funny, when I was a customer I thought they were such an annoyance, and now I just find the hilariously awful. Anyway, I thought the following was germane to this thread:


What do you people think about this? At first I was a little...I don't know...appalled? But now I'm not so sure it's a bad program.

What about you?

Why do the care what you put up there ?

They offer you a huge amount of space knowing that most users won't ever actually use that much for their website. However if you're using it as backup space for your music, documents, photos, video etc... then you will.

Basically their servers don't have enough capacity to store every user at max usage. Just shoving more disks into the servers isn't all they have to do. They need to make sure their backup system can cope with the extra data. Their compromise for this new 50GB backup service is that its on another server and that server isn't backed up at all.

Not sure whether I'd trust this to be honest. I know they say its meant to be a backup and not your only copy. I'm just curious as to how reliable this server will be. It could be a ancient server wedged full of drives in RAID0 for all we know...

That's not a bad compromise, really. Still, even if this policy had come around when I was a Dreamhost customer, it wouldn't have been enough to keep me. Their other issues (overselling of the web servers themselves, infamously horrible support, and repeated billing SNAFUs) make them worth the $9/yr introductory price, but not nearly worth the $10/month it goes up to after the first year.

That said, their control panel was decent, and they were never hesitant to add things like ssh, subversion, video streaming, and AFP that other discount hosts weren't offering. So, for anyone just getting in the game, it's really not a bad place to start.

I think I agree with all of that.

Really, backups are all about risk. If you just backup to another drive in your computer or to an external drive, you risk losing data if the computer gets fried or your house burns down. I'm of the mind that if you're backing up online, there's little chance of both places losing all the data on the same day.

Personally, I use online backup and offsite backup. I take a hard disk to my folks' house every once and a while.

So basically, I don't mind that they won't back this stuff up. I think it's understandable.