Let me give you a bit of background on this. About a month ago we started Dumbfiles, which we host on Dreamhost, which has been wonderful to us for over a year. The problem is that we’ve experienced a ton of issues with our service lately and this might hinder Dumbfiles’ growth. So we started looking around for other hosts (which by the way, is awful, all the review sites are paid, if you know of any non-biased review, let me know).
We looked at Hostgator, but of course, they’re known for suspending accounts for excessive CPU usage out of the blue. We looked at MediaTemple, but they don’t provide the bandwidth we need. And finally we stumbled upon Site5. $18 a month gives you 10 TB of bandwidth and 1 TB of storage. THAT IS TWICE WHAT WE’VE GOT WITH DREAMHOST!!!! Surely there had to be a catch, but I couldn’t find their Terms of Service, so I headed over the their sign-up page. I started filling out all the usual stuff, and as I was about the hit the "SUBMIT ORDER" button, when I decided to check out their TOS (which is located here). This is what I found.
Note: Pornography and sex-related merchandising are prohibited on any Site5 Internet Solutions, Inc. server. This includes sites that may infer sexual content, or link to adult content elsewhere. This is also true for sites that promote any illegal activity or content that may be damaging to Site5 Internet Solutions, Inc. servers or any other server on the internet. Links to such materials are also prohibited.
OK, fine, no porn and illegal shenanigans, but disallowing "sites that may infer sexual content, or link to adult content elsewhere" seems a bit extreme. That means that I can’t blog about Jenna Jameson the porn star. That means that if someone says that they are going to hump a goat on a comment on my blog, I’ll get suspended with Site5? Isn’t that a bit extreme?
So, we’re keeping Dreamhost. They’re friendly and generous. We just need to expand Dumbfiles as much as possible so that we can move to our own co-located server. As a matter of fact…you can help! Go sign up for an account….its free!
Update #1. [This guy] is having all sorts of issues with Dreamhost. I’m afraid that now that they’re 10, their network is falling apart…c’mon…a core router is down and there is no redundancy in place to remedy that?
Update #2. Anyone know of a reliable web host that provides at least 1 TB and disk space and 2 or 3 TB of bandwidth? I’ll be happy to use a referral code…
2 Comments
Try building your stuff on Amazon EC2/S3 or Joyent.
Joyent in particular seems pretty cool.
On Amazon, It’ll take some work and Amazon may screw up every so often but I’d trust them to run a massive infrastructure better than these smaller operations whose shoestring budget compromises everything. Amazon has diverse revenue streams and is flush with market cap. They’ll be around.
I’d still go with Joyent though, thats their main bread and butter and the people there seem a bit sharper than Dreamhost
If you get tired of the huge guys like dreamhost/site5/hostgator try somewhat smaller hosting providers for a refreshing experience. I recommend http://www.asmallorange.com or http://www.webfaction.com for a refreshing experience … stable servers and good customer service is all I ask for.
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[...] recently issued similar complaints and moved his blog over to another hosts, while Joe over at JJMELO was fortunate enough to avoid having to experience them first hand due to a beef with their Terms [...]