Best Website Hosting Server Provider

I have used a variety of web hosts over the years for different websites that I have created or helped with: HalfpriceHosting, HostDime, Lunarpages, and now DreamHost. Most of them are more similar than they are different, but with some of them I feel that they are really trying to be the best they can and provide the best value in a package that is fair to their users. DreamHost is my current favorite, so let me tell you a little more about why I chose them.

Now, not everyone has the same needs, so maybe this advice isn’t best for you. My websites are relatively low volume. I don’t need 99.999% uptime. I want something that is going to be pretty cheap, that is going to be easy for me to edit/update, and that has the features I care about (which can also be stated as “has a lot of features”).

• First, stuff that’s the same or better than other places: disk space, bandwidth, network speed, servers, email accounts, ftp access, databases, subdomains, etc. All that stuff is in there. Further, they use a “rolling improvement” kind of process. If they improve something for new accounts, it also applies to old accounts.
• Second, they are constantly increasing the disk space, bandwidth, CPU minutes, etc. that each user is allowed to have. For some they even state a minimum level if increases in those areas per year. That’s service I’ve gotten from other places only after I called their customer support. DreamHost just gives it to me.

Next, the places where DreamHost really shines:

• scp access - I hate using FTP to load files to my host because anyone on the network between my machine and my host can read my FTP password and once they have that I might as well hand them the keys to the server. I now use scp to load files when necessary which means that my username/password are at least safe enough that I don’t have to worry.
• Shell access - when I try to load a big package like Gallery on previous hosts the process was something like download compressed software file from website, uncompress it on my computer, upload the uncompressed files to the server. That process of uploading could take several hours and often got interrupted due to timeouts on the FTP server. Now, I use shell access and wget to download the compressed file directly to the host and then uncompress them on the host. This saves hours from each week of my life and time is the most limited resource in my life.
• Users are monitored and bad users are put on probation and can then removed. This is the main source of complaints against DreamHost, but for me, it’s a real plus. On my old host I would always see that the workload on the server was in the 2-8process/cpu level. So far my server at DreamHost sits around a 1 process/cpu and part of that is my old host was a really old server. The other part is that DreamHost measures CPU minutes and database Conueries and if your shared host goes above a threshold of usage for these values, it gets moved to an Evaluation Server where they keep track of your actions and my require you to pay more for a dedicated server or allow you to tweak parameters on your site to get under a reasonable level of usage. To me, this is great. While I hope I might see whole tidal waves of traffic I doubt I will and in the meantime the guy who is hogging server resources is making my account respond slowly. With DreamHost, the response times have been solid.
• Their server farm has been designed with security and redundancy from the start. One of the few complaints I read about DreamHost prior to signing up (and which has slightly annoyed me as well) is that configuration changes in their proprietary control panel take a while to be implemented. For one, why would they develop a proprietary control panel when everyone else uses CPanel? Well, CPanel is very expensive, so to reduce costs, DreamHost has just continued building their in house system. That system can take 15 minutes or so for changes to take effect. At first this frustrated me, but then I read this forum post about how their configuration control sits on a redundant set of protected machines in the data center and then individual web hosts are built from this central control. So, if a server dies they can quickly rebuild it to get your services up and running again. That is the kind of trade-off that I am willing to take and it just took a few days to get used to planning ahead on control panel changes so that they don’t slow down my work flow.
• I can run PHP and even PHP5. Nobody else I’ve used does that. And if I want to run some special flags on my compilation of PHP, they allow me to run PHP as a CGI and use my own custom built binary. I _love_ that fact though I hardly think I’ll use it. It’s just the way that UNIX was meant to help the world they are taking advantage of it.

Cost is the same at dream host as it has been at other hosts, even including all of these extra services. And this is really the best part, I signed up with a promotion code from someone else, so my cost was less than their advertised price. Naturally I want to pass along that promo code to other people, so here’s the skinny: Follow the link over to DreamHost and towards the end of the signup process you use the KNADS promo code and that will get you a discount depending on the kind of plan you select:

If you do the math, it gets the monthly price of hosting under the cost of a six pack of beer. Hells yeah.