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DreamHost is Bananas - Tuesday, August 23, 2022
I've been hosting this site with DreamHost since 2007 (wow), and in that time, I've been largely happy with them. Their hosting plans are not the cheapest, and even their domain registration fees are a little inflated, but staying with DreamHost has meant a mostly worry-free experience.
I've appreciated having private domain registration when that wasn't an industry standard, being able to set up email aliases for subdomains (lots of other popular registrars don't seem to have documentation about this, so they probably don't support it), and having no caps on bandwidth or even disk usage for as long as I can remember. Their uptime is the best in the industry, as measured by at least a couple different review sites. And their customer support, with few exceptions, has been stellar.
This week, though, they've been having some hiccups. Mail forwarding from my aliases has been unreliable. Several test emails that I sent to myself from another account were never delivered. Their status page mentioned email issues earlier today but has since been updated to say that everything is operational. However, my test emails still seem to be disappearing into the void.
They also apparently rolled out an Apache config change recently that broke things for me under certain conditions. I was trying to edit a blog entry earlier today and was greeted with a "server error" page when submitting the form. I narrowed the issue down to being triggered by a certain keyword in the text I was submitting. DreamHost makes Apache logs available for requests to each domain, which is extremely useful, and in the logs I could see that ModSecurity was blocking messages containing several words including "get", "post", "delete" and "head". However, it appeared to be matching against the request body instead of (just) the headers, which is a bit silly. So having text like "head home" or "get bananas" in a paragraph followed by a newline caused the request to be rejected.
Bananas indeed. I contacted support and, after another message where I had to re-explain what was broken, they went ahead and whitelisted the rules that were causing my error. Hopefully they did this for all impacted users, as I'm sure the config change wasn't affecting just me.
Lately I've been thinking about switching to a cheaper host, and the latest round of mishaps has further fanned that desire. I just recently moved our church domain's registration to Google Domains because it's $12 there compared to $15.99 with DreamHost. But all the other major hosts seem to be disliked by saavy users due to shady business practices, less than ideal uptime, and whatnot. And the hosts generally recommended on Reddit's webhosting subreddit are more expensive than DreamHost, at least for my particular use case. So, every so often I think about switching and every time my conclusion is the same: DreamHost is still the best value I can buy. I'm sure that they'll resolve my email forwarding issue after I contact them, and then things will go back to running without a hitch. I'm also reminded that I was extremely impressed with how hard they fought the DOJ over a user privacy issue, which became a win for privacy across the entire Internet. So while the frugal side of me hates paying more for things than I absolutely have to, it's hard to put a price tag on peace of mind.
I've appreciated having private domain registration when that wasn't an industry standard, being able to set up email aliases for subdomains (lots of other popular registrars don't seem to have documentation about this, so they probably don't support it), and having no caps on bandwidth or even disk usage for as long as I can remember. Their uptime is the best in the industry, as measured by at least a couple different review sites. And their customer support, with few exceptions, has been stellar.
This week, though, they've been having some hiccups. Mail forwarding from my aliases has been unreliable. Several test emails that I sent to myself from another account were never delivered. Their status page mentioned email issues earlier today but has since been updated to say that everything is operational. However, my test emails still seem to be disappearing into the void.
They also apparently rolled out an Apache config change recently that broke things for me under certain conditions. I was trying to edit a blog entry earlier today and was greeted with a "server error" page when submitting the form. I narrowed the issue down to being triggered by a certain keyword in the text I was submitting. DreamHost makes Apache logs available for requests to each domain, which is extremely useful, and in the logs I could see that ModSecurity was blocking messages containing several words including "get", "post", "delete" and "head". However, it appeared to be matching against the request body instead of (just) the headers, which is a bit silly. So having text like "head home" or "get bananas" in a paragraph followed by a newline caused the request to be rejected.
Bananas indeed. I contacted support and, after another message where I had to re-explain what was broken, they went ahead and whitelisted the rules that were causing my error. Hopefully they did this for all impacted users, as I'm sure the config change wasn't affecting just me.
Lately I've been thinking about switching to a cheaper host, and the latest round of mishaps has further fanned that desire. I just recently moved our church domain's registration to Google Domains because it's $12 there compared to $15.99 with DreamHost. But all the other major hosts seem to be disliked by saavy users due to shady business practices, less than ideal uptime, and whatnot. And the hosts generally recommended on Reddit's webhosting subreddit are more expensive than DreamHost, at least for my particular use case. So, every so often I think about switching and every time my conclusion is the same: DreamHost is still the best value I can buy. I'm sure that they'll resolve my email forwarding issue after I contact them, and then things will go back to running without a hitch. I'm also reminded that I was extremely impressed with how hard they fought the DOJ over a user privacy issue, which became a win for privacy across the entire Internet. So while the frugal side of me hates paying more for things than I absolutely have to, it's hard to put a price tag on peace of mind.