This is the third consecutive year that one of my websites has been hosted with Dreamhost. Despite reading a lot of negative comments about Dreamhost, my experience with them has been positive overall, so I decided to hang in there for a third year, but this year has been anything but happy, and with the last outage of the Blingy cluster, I almost signed up for MediaTemple that same day, and probably would have, has I not read some comments about their basic (gs) package having huge latency issues and other problems.
The next day Dreamhost looked like it was seeking revenge, churning out pages faster than I’d seen it do in months, but good things are never meant to last, Dreamhost is so slow today that even the Visual editor for Wordpress isn’t able to work properly. Come June, I’m anticipating some serious traffic, and at this rate, Dreamhost just wont cope (hell, it cant even cope with a Facebook application with just 115 daily active users right now), so I’m going to the pros. I see two low-cost options stacked up – MediaTemple and SliceHost. SliceHost gives root access on their $20 a month VPS while MediaTemple uses a grid service that is somewhat better than shared services but reportedly not as good VPS, no matter what their marketing hoopla says, but they are trying to correct it with their upcoming (cs) package, which I might consider if its out in time.