My web hosting company for kd4dcy.net is dreamhost.com. To be fair to them, they’ve served me well for over a year now with almost no downtime. However, if you’re thinking of choosing a hosting company right now, I must honestly say that I can’t recommend them. When I signed up with them, they impressed me as a small company with very big plans and a good attitude toward customer service. From the look of things, I guessed they probably had five or six employees, probably either all related or a group of close friends. There was a certain informality and lack of corporate decorum that I found refreshing.
It seems perhaps I was lucky the first year. Starting last month, I began to see downtime and unreliability. The first time this happened, I gave them a phone call and was greeted with a smug message stating that they don’t answer phone calls, and that I should send them an e-mail or use their support pages. Since their support pages were unreachable and so was my e-mail, that made no sense. So, I tried sending an e-mail from my work address. It was smugly bounced back, with a note explaining that they don’t take e-mails from addresses that aren’t registered customers.
When I complained about the lack of any means of contacting them when things went down, I got a nasty e-mail response which said, in part, “I don’t know why you need to notify us when things go down, since we probably know long before you do.” Interesting, since the announcement they posted after that particular downtime stated that due to some problems they were having, they DIDN’T notice that their entire network had gone down until a couple of hours later.
Most of the downtime was brief and had minimal impact, until the last two weeks. During that time they’ve had numerous, extended outages that have really put me in some very bad situations. I recently took over maintenance of some radio-related pages as a service to the amateur radio community, and the very day I put them up and announced the new URL, Dreamhost burped and died, lying clinically dead for a couple of hours. Then it was down this morning for eight hours. The head guy sent an apologetic e-mail saying that this would never, ever happen again. Then at 5PM it happened again.
Anybody can have a bad couple of weeks, and they did have a sterling record prior to the last month or two, so I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt … it’s easier to stay put, because even a couple of hours of outage are better than two days of propagation confusion if I move the domain. However, I wouldn’t say this was a great time to become a new Dreamhost customer.
In other news, pollen season has arrived here in the Peach State. My burgundy car was bright yellow with pollen this morning, and my eyes are now bright red from the histamine reaction. My HMO (DAMN AND BLAST BLUE CROSS AND BLUE SHIELD … sorry, reflex) has decided they will no longer cover the only allergy medication that works well for me (Allegra) because something far less effective (Claritin) is now available over-the-counter. This is what happens when the government decides that certain corporations, because they employ powerful lobbyists and have the best politicians money can buy, should be granted TOTAL IMMUNITY FROM LAWSUITS. I would like to find the very politicians who passed that idiotic bill, line them up, and hit them all soundly across their heads with a shovel, then make them go to HMO physicians for care.
I found a really interesting web site today. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the designers of the original Macintosh computer, has begun a project to collect some of the interesting stories and anecdotes from that historic effort. It’s located at http://folklore.org and I spent my entire lunch break today reading about half of it. Very entertaining.