1ski

I’m the volunteer webmaster for the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, a Holocaust survivors’ rights group based in New York.  We signed up for a DreamHost shared Web hosting account a couple of months ago and, in the past month, have encountered a significant amount of trouble with their service.

In fact, our Web site has currently been offline for weeks, spitting out server errors to no end. But despite the fact that Wordpress is configured correctly, that it functioned without issue until recently, that the server’s error logs show that the Web server itself is at fault (FastCGI is constantly crashing), and that I’ve run into similar problems with other clients’ DreamHost accounts, DreamHost nonetheless claims that there is no problem at all on their end.  Instead, they claim that our Web site is too highly trafficked and recommends strongly that we upgrade to a more expensive hosting package.

There’s just one problem:  Our Web site receives, on average, roughly 500 visitors per month.  That is what we, in the Web industry, regard as a negligible amount of traffic — barely enough to have any effect at all on the stability of a properly functioning Web server.

So now, rather than fixing their broken server, they’re trying to force us to spend more money and are refusing to compensate us for the downtime or to refund our payment, paid two years in-advance, in-full.

I have multiple other clients and accounts with DreamHost and it would be preferable to not have to start pulling all of our sites off their server.  I would prefer that they acknowledge that they are at fault, that they work to resolve the issue, and that they provide credit for the downtime.  However, that’s looking less and less likely the way it’s going to play out, so let this be a warning to you to steer clear of their service.

Way to bilk Holocaust survivors, DreamHost!