Dreamhost
Dreamhost is an amazingly hit-or-miss experience. For portfolio-ware sites, I have clients that don’t want to spend a lot (or even a little) per-month for hosting. On paper, Dreamhost seems great from a price/feature perspective. For one thing, I thought it was awesome that you could deploy Rails on a $5.95/m hosting plan, (not that I’ve tried this).
Filespanker is at Dreamhost, because it’s simple and static. And it’s amazingly fast. I couldn’t really ask more from a shared host.
Which is why I recommended Dreamhost for my newest client.
Apparently, we ended up on the wrong machine. Servicing the initial request (Waiting for… in Firefox speak) regularly takes 4 or 5 seconds. Even for static files. This puts me in a tight spot, because I spoke pretty confidently that “a simple Dreamhost plan” would handle their modest site just fine. Now we’re trying to find another hosting plan and cash in on the 90-day money-back guarantee.
Yes, I know how shared hosting works, and I’m not gonna harp on “overselling”. Overselling is required to run a competitive shared hosting service. The thing is, if that’s your game, you actually need to be able to automatically and transparently do things like migrate accounts between machines as needed.
Also, as bad as Dreamhost has been to me, they’re still head and shoulders above the worst hosting experience I’ve ever had to deal with: C I Host.