My Amazing Experience With DreamHost

I started a small site on their cheapest shared hosting. Well, it got pretty big and one day blew up. I got 12,000 unique visits(30K actual visits) within about 10 hours. The load this put on the shared server was bogging down everyone who was also on the server. DreamHost disabled my site until the load went down. Thats fine by me, its shared hosting and I was affecting other people. Would have been awesome if DH would have TOLD ME that they disabled my site. I realized the next day my site was offline. Everything within the Control Panel looked fine, I couldnt figure out wtf was wrong. So I send in a support e-mail and Im promptly replied with a generic automated message telling me Ill be helped shortly. About 30 hours later Im finally told my site was put offline due to the suddenly large amount of resources it was taking.

They refused to turn my site back on until I made my coding more efficient. Even after I reassured them that there wouldnt be that many visitors anymore, as the 2 days offline pretty much guaranteed to kill over half my traffic. Nope, I still had to change the site.

Whatever, I made it more efficent, used a cache so it wasnt pulling the page from a DB every time it was visited. Were now at three and a half days offline, awesome.

They still dont believe this is efficient enough. I switch to their VPS service and this satisfied them. They agree to turn the site back on now. 5 days offline. Im getting maybe 100 unique visits at this time.

After about 10 days of their VPS service(WOW their VPS blows donkey balls) I send an e-mail to have it cancelled and just go back to shared hosting. "As your site requires a lot of resources, your cancellation has been denied." At this point Im pretty irritated. My reply is "No offense, but thats wasnt a request. Ive moved to JaguarPC(you guys rock!) VPS service and I would like to go back to my shared hosting. I thank you in advance for doing this for me."

2 days later they say its switched. Oh yea. BTW, you pay daily for the VPS. It just adds on to your shared hosting costs, and yes I had to pay for those 2 days.

Skip ahead 2 months. I get an e-mail saying Ive been billed from DreamHost. This is normal, as my $10 shared hosting account is still active. Only this bill is for $80. Ive just been charged for 2 months worth of VPS and 2 months of shared hosting out of nowhere.

After about 6 e-mails(and 3 days) to their support team Ive finally got a response from a real person, only to tell me that hes forwarding my email to another tech support person that can "better help me". Whatever, do what you do DreamHost. Were now at a week(and 4 more emails asking whats going on, etc) when I get another response. Hey, my problem has been forwarded again. SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET.

So, two weeks later, I finally get my refund with a "We apologize for any inconvenience." e-mail.