As some of you might know, I’m currently hosted on Dreamhost (don’t worry no referral link there). In my opinion they offer pretty good services for what I’m paying them for. I’m on shared hosting, so sometimes services are getting pretty slow. I’m not complaining though. Today they had one of their longest periods of downtime. At least this was scheduled and we were informed. Kudos to Dreamhost!
From what I read, they had to move one of their clusters called ‘randy’. That caused some of their services related to that cluster to go offline. Well it appeared that all of those services went down and apparently all my domains were somehow related to that cluster. According to their status site they were down more than 8 hours. Personally I don’t mind having my site down for 8 hours. I know it’s a lot but it’s not that I’m running the most important site in the world. Anywho, what bugged me the most, was that I had some other projected hosted on the same cluster and that made me incapable to work. That was indeed frustrating.
That also made me start thinking of switching web hosting provider. There are some really good providers out there but quality comes with a price. I totally understand that. I visited a few providers and got some ideas but the best feedback usually comes from the users. So if anybody wants to suggest a provider, I’d be glad to check it out.
Kudos for downtime? Thats a first :-)
Why not try Amazon Elastic Web? They give you a machine running within a Xen environment, and you pay for what you use (CPU time, storage and traffic) which I believe its the most affordable solution currently, and gives you maximum flexibility since you have your own virtual server within their cluster.