Lesson reinforced this week: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Case in point: Dreamhost’s supposed 500GB hosting plans entice you with the promise of lots of space for cheap (about $11/mo) but you can’t use that space for file storage.

I have been trying to make up my mind about an off-site backup service for more than a year now. I kept looking at Amazon S3 but, as cheap as it is, it still seemed expensive, especially because I have around 350GB of data I need to backup. Most file backup/storage sites only give you a tiny amount of space (who only has 5GB worth of data to back up these days??) or charge you hundreds of dollars a month for as much storage as I needed. The main options that were even partially affordable were hosting by Dreamhost or GoDaddy, or Amazon S3.

We have had an account with Dreamhost now for a few years and while it hasn’t been 100% uptime we hadn’t had many other problems with them in general. We have 5 live websites on the Dreamhost account but we’re only using a tiny fraction of the almost 540GB (growing weekly) of available space. I couldn’t justify paying for S3 if we were already paying for the space on Dreamhost.

So I uploaded about 80GB worth of pictures. Within a few days I got a notice that the files weren’t directly related to website hosting and I had 3 options: remove all the files, change the account to a file storage account for $0.20/mo/GB or do nothing and have the account suspended. Doing a bit of research turned up that there was some fine print in the ToS that says they have the option to charge you extra for files that are hosted and not related to website hosting.

I rolled my eyes and started the week-long process of ftping up to my Amazon S3 account instead. It’s actually cheaper by $0.05/mo for storage than Dreamhost’s rate. But it was a busy week and I forgot to remove my files from the Dreamhost account until about 10pm on the deadline day…

Dreamhost suspended our account, cutting off the live websites we were hosting. Now maybe we deserved that for not making the deadline but their reply system for the support emails kept bouncing back our requests to delete the files and restore our account. We supposedly had call-support with the plan we were on but there’s no phone number on the site for you to get in touch with anyone. We were scrambling till we finally thought of submitting a ticket on the website instead of trying to reply to the original suspension email again. Our sites were down for about 24 hours and we are not happy campers.

I’m disgruntled with Dreamhost for several reasons:

• Not making it completely clear on their hosting plan description pages that you can’t use the space for file storage, which resulted in me wasting my time uploading all those files in the first place. Who the hell has 500+GB of files related to their website to host?? Are they really going to let you do something like your own YouTube on a $11/mo web hosting account? I’m tempted to try it just to see if they suspend me for “legitimate” web hosting of that much material.
• Not having some kind of way to contact them by phone in an emergency, especially when we were supposed to have call support on our plan. We found out that it’s really “call back support” meaning you email or submit a ticket and they’ll call you when they get to it. That doesn’t cut it when your sites are down.
• Not having their email support system working for replies. It was barfing on the format of the subject line that was generated, not something we would know how to fix to make sure the email got through. When email is the only means of contact it’s important that the system be robust enough not to bounce back replies to your support tickets!!
• And, as a side issue, I’m still upset that they consolidated all their hosting plans into one option that is half as expensive as the plan we were on but with only minor differences in features, but they didn’t bother to notify us of those differences or that we could be saving money by switching. Since we just always go directly to panel.dreamhost.com and don’t bother to go look at the plan options on the main site, we didn’t know about the changes. We were paying double what we needed to for almost a year.

It’s frustrating because when we’re actually able to GET support from Dreamhost they’re always nice and helpful. It’s just too hard to get someone to respond in a reasonable timeframe from an email or when the email system is not working.

I’m using S3 for backup and after this experience we’ll be looking for a new host soon as well. For all those people who have debated about whether you should use Dreamhost or S3 for backup, the answer lies in a new take on another old addage: “You don’t get what you don’t pay for”. Amazon S3 is the way to go.