If you can see this (and it’s sufficiently close to February 2008), then this file is being served on my new web host, Dreamhost.
Dreamhost is now hosting all three of my domains: aerojockey.com, tamperedevidence.com, and virtualfief.com.
My old host, Total Choice Hosting, was a very nice service, and I would highly recommend them to anyone looking to do a basic homepage or small business site. It’s great if your site is mostly static pages with maybe a few CGI scripts thrown it, which is what my site was. They were very responsive to issues that would come up. The price was very reasonable.
However, I pretty much outgrew it. It had a few major limitations that eventually cramped my style too much. They did not allow shell access; this was a biggie. Sometimes shell access is indispensible. (I often worked around this by writing CGI shell scripts that I could invoke, but it was terribly inconvenient.) Another limitation was a ban on hosting multiple domains; multiple domains meant multiple accounts. This wasn’t an issue when I had only one domain. When I got my second domain it was. I actually had two different accounts with Total Choice Hosting for about a year.
Finally a need arose that Total Choice Hosting couldn’t help me with: namely the need to host a Subversion repository. (It’s not open source, so I couldn’t use Sourceforge or Google Code.) I figured it was time to move on.
What I needed was a fewer limitations, and certain bells and whistles. After reading a bunch of reviews on the Web I came across Dreamhost. Many of the reviews I read for Dreamhost were by web developers who’d moved on from it. They basically said it workable but suboptimal for their highly advanced. Some of them even continued to used Dreamhost for serving static content. I don’t need highly advanced stuff, though, so that sounded pretty good to me.
For the price, Dreamhost has a ton of disk space and a ton of bandwidth. (When I saw Dreamhost’s claim that they offer 500 GB of storage, I kept looking for an asterisk. The only catch I could discern was that they slam if you go over the limit.) Dreamhost will host an unlimited number of domains for a single account. They allow shell access. They host Subversion repositories. Also, most the tricks I that I used with TotalChoiceHosting (using mod_rewrite, for example), were also supported by Dreamhost.
The downside, that their customer service has a reputation for being not so good, is not really a big deal to me. I think I filed maybe two tickets in 5+ years with Total Choice Hosting. It might be a problem if there were a lot of downtime, but I would guess most people’s problems are their own fault. (That’s never happened to me, of course.)
