fyi - my experience with Dreamhost - Re: [SGVLUG] recommend a hosting provider

[matti]

Hi,

1st - thanks for the great feedback!!!


Dreamhost...

here's my experiences with them...

1st) Customer Service/billing issues:

got a wholesale deal on hosting, and did a few referrals/clients,
and reportedly with each referral/client I could charge that
client the whole sale price +, anything above the wholesale
would be a credit towards my service charges.

OK. seemed like a good deal.

Tried to make a deal so that the clients basically would
cover my hosting costs and give me a little bit extra
to cover some time to help them setup their accounts.
(i.e. less than the full retail pricing they were
charging.)

Seemed to work fine, UNTIL after 1yr, when they then
automagikally started charging me full retail for my
service (to get the wholesale price I would have to
abandon that account and the associated clients
and buy a new account .. )

I then discovered, and felt suckered, that the credits
I had gathered now did not cover my costs.

Felt I should just have referred the clients to someone
else, since I was feeling like I got caught in a
"bait and switch"/misrepresentation/fraud especially
considering my experiences with DH as lacking some
basic functionality/features I expected. (see below)

* The part I didn't like about this was NOT knowing
* it was going to happen ahead of time, before I
* spent the time getting the clients onto dreamhost.
(if it is a first year only deal, then MAKE it obvious!)

NO WHERE did I see this written up.



NOW, the technical thing I didn't like...
(they may have fixed this by now.. I don't know)

2) For a hosting account on a shared system 

IF someone already had "info at theirdomainname.com"
on THAT system, I could not setup "info at mydomainname.com"

THAT was very irritating to me, so much so that for that
reason ALONE I would recommend clients to use a different
hosting provider IF they were going to pay FULL RETAIL 
pricing.. thus I got rather pissed when I discovered that
after setting up clients on DH, they got nailed for
FULL price one year later... and were not getting as
good functionality/features as I would have expected.
(none of the accounts was I attempting anything 
complicated so i don't know how DH compares with others
in those areas... )

best
matti



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