Moving servers yet again! | Comments (2)
Posted in Muffin Research Labs on 25th March 2006, 9:25 pm by Stuart
Just recently the server that this site is hosted on has been a bit odd. After a couple of complete crashes and a day’s downtime, I spent Thursday evening tidying up any problem areas that I could find, and then on Friday it dawned. The top command had been showing around 190MB of total memory available, which seemed to be a bit low and then when the specs where checked the server should have 512MB installed! By the looks of it half the memory has died. Where the other 64MB has gone is anyone’s guess but if it’s been syphoned off for graphics card usage then this is a bit rubbish for a dedicated server (we have no use for graphics running!) unless that’s some kind of hardware enforced situation.
Granted, hardware does fail from time to time but the apathetic support from Amenworld has been appalling. Hence I am voting with my feet and moving over to Dreamhost. Dreamhost are very friendly in every way and any questions you ask are always answered within a few hours, not to mention that they have 24 hour support in contrast to Amenworld’s weekday working hours policy.
Once again I have set everything up to be a smooth as possible during the transition to the new server. If you are reading this then you’ve made it! If you notice anything odd please do get in touch via the contact form.
I hope you have better luck, although I would recommend speaking to Clive who had a few “issues” with Dreamhost.
There’s also a lot of complaints on Google Groups, however this is mostly referencing shared hosting from what I can see so you might be ok.
http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?q=dreamhost
I can always recommend a good dedi host if necessary
@Andy: I have not heard anything but good things about DreamHost but they a touch on the cheap side. Although I am using their shared hosting they provide a ton of features such as Ruby on Rails and Subversion both of which I’ve been meaning to get into.
Using a single dedicated server gives you control, but it also means that one server is running everything; mail, databases and serving web pages. At least with what I now have with dreamhost my database, mail and web stuff are all on separate servers which will help with any future hardware failures as I would only lose one service temporarily rather than all three.
It comes with a 97-day money back guaruntee so I will see how the first couple of months goes. It’s a pain to keep changing hosts so hopefully DreamHost will live up to my expectations.