This weekend as I did upgrades to this blog I made a couple of mistakes, or at least my FTP program did. I went to delete one folder and instead, according to my FTP program, it appeared as if I had deleted every folder BUT the one I wanted to delete – in other words I had basically deleted Entrepreneurs-Journey.com from the server.
Yikes!
I quickly lodged a support ticket with Dreamhost, the company that hosts this site, asking for a back-up to be restored of the most recent version available. Dreamhost makes hourly, daily and weekly back-ups so I was confident I could get everything restored. I also had my own offline back-up available if necessary, but It would take a couple of hours to upload everything and make sure the settings were right with things like the adserver – a job I didn’t want to do.
The Dreamhost support staff replied within five minutes with a back-up. It turned out my FTP program was not accurately representing what had happened and I only had to finish the WordPress upgrade to get the site back online, but it sure made me feel good that Dreamhost acted so quickly with a complete back-up of my blog.
Also this week we had another problem with both Entrepreneurs-Journey.com and SmallBusinessBranding.com apparently bringing down the shared server at Dreamhost due to too many hits coming in.
In the past with other hosting companies when this has happened to my sites, the company has switched the offending site off, or even on one occasion, told me to leave the hosting service without even a chance to fix the problem or upgrade my package, resulting in many days of downtime and not a happy Yaro.
Dreamhost couldn’t let my sites take down the whole server, so they had to do something, but instead of outright switching off my two largest blogs, they just restricted the amount of incoming hits the sites could receive and sent me an email explaining the problem. My blogs were still online and delivering content to visitors and I was given a chance to rectify the problem without any downtime.
Rob Kingston and I installed WP-Cache 2.0 on both blogs and I completed the WordPress upgrade here an Entrepreneurs-Journey. I contacted Dreamhost and they reduced the restrictions immediately.
While I’m not 100% happy with every aspect of Dreamhost you can’t fault their support. I have no problem recommending their services to any blogger or webmaster looking for a reliable and very affordable webhost.
Just a note about hosting… I’ve had similar good experiences with M6.net (www.M6.net) – an Aussie based host (at least they charge in AUD).
While their website might be a bit naff to look at, their support is second to none – they even set WordPress up for me on my soon-to-be-launched blog.
Highly recommend – and extremely good value.
I am a fan of Dreamhost and have transferred all of my sites over.
Can’t say I’m a fan of Dreamhost, they’ve been pretty unstable for me during the last month or two. I do agree that their support reps. are quick, polite and are always willing to do the most to fix your problem, or make you feel better if they can’t, lol.
Allen.H
Got to say that I’m the opposite to Allen H, love Dreamhost, hate the support. As shared hosts go Dreamhost are brilliant, but the support is as slow as a wet weekend, I’ve usually found 12-24 hours before I get a response from them, but on a bright note I’ve only ever had to contact support a handful of times.
I’ve just signed up with Dreamhost yesterday for one of my new ventures and was pleasently surprised when I discovered that I’d caught a one off promotion ~ $75 off all yearly hosting packages. This meant that I got hosting for a year and a domain for around $40. That’ll do for me!
Note: Sorry folks, i think the promotion’s ended now!
I am not with DreamHost.
I just want to say that it is really important to choose the right webhost for your business if you want to have headaches later.