FuCoder.com is now hosted on DreamHost. Using the cheapest hosting plan, but it still provides me far more than I need. 4.8Gb space and 120Gb bandwidth a month. Shell on Debian-based Linux server. Cron job. Etc. It is actually the first time I signed up to a hosting account — most my other sites are still hosted on my Gentoo box at home, pumping data to the world at just-fast-enough 512kbits/sec (sometimes goes down to 0.5kbits/sec when I am torrenting).
DreamHost is, well, not bad. I am still getting used to how everything works, and might give a review later this week. A hosted solution is never going to be as good as having all your sites sitting behind the desk in your study room. No root access, higher latency from where I usually work (on the bed with my lappy), limited storage, and DreamHost’s control panel simply sucks. But at least your sites don’t suddenly go offline when Energy Australia decided to come and fix the power-line next to your home.
Which is what happened to me last Saturday.
Note — if you are looking at signing up one of the most popular host out there, use promotion code “FUCODER” when you sign up yearly plans, and you will get USD$77 discount. I’ll get $20 referring you.
I don’t really think its fair to say Dreamhost’s panel sucks. For a programmer you definitely are not going to get the milage out of it that you do from Webmin or Plesk, but I hear people say that cPanel is better and I just have to laugh.
The Dreamhost panel is tailored to their services and integrated. I have sites hosted on Dreamhost, Site5, TextDrive, Hostopia and Rackspace. There is something very clean and well organized about Dreamhost’s panel that you don’t get elsewhere.
Hosting from home is the ideal… except for the bandwidth issue. Here in the UK, the highest cheap upstream speed you can get is 1.3mbps (on a 24mbps plan) which is pretty good compared to the usual 512kbps.
Power shouldn’t be a problem. My friend hosts from home and has a UPS system in place.
Charles — Power and hardware stability has been a big problem for me. I have been hosting from home for almost 6 years (from 33.6k to 512k) and had plenty of hardware failure and power problem over the years. Especially hard disk issues that led to FS corruption — bringing the server back will usually be a few days later.
Then there’s ISP issue. Last year I had 3 day outage as the up-stream ISP terminated the reseller ISP due to some legal fights. Ouch.
Now I have all my sites hosted on 2 shared accounts and 2 VPS. DreamHost is only one of them. :)