DreamHost promotes unlimited domain web hosting for $8.95/month. It seemed like a sweet deal, so I signed up for it. The reality is that their offer is misleading. DreamHost offers 100 MB of memory per account. If you exceed this number – even for a second – they unleash a procwatch to kill the process.
At this point you can reach out to DreamHost’s support team. They will tell you that it is the fault of WordPress plugins and then try and upsell you on a VPS account. They promise not to kill your processes if you get a VPS account. Kind of like a shop keeper that pays the gangster protection money so his store doesn’t burn down. How sweet! My personal opinion is why should I pay for an enhanced service if the basic service is awful? I’ll just switch web hosts.
Back to the question of resources. Just how much memory does a website running WordPress with some basic plugins use? As of this writing, I have 2 WordPress sites on DreamHost (not DigitalColony.com). I installed 2 plugins to help me track my memory usage: WP-Memory-Usage and TPC! Memory Usage. Below is a screen shot from one of my sites. The other site shows similar numbers.
With these two plugins I learned a few things:
- DreamHost limits your PHP memory to just 90 MB.
- A basic install of WordPress takes about 30 MB of memory on a 64 bit installation of PHP.
- I activated and deactivated every plugin. Most used trivial amounts of memory. No plugin exceeded 2 MB of memory. Even the much aligned All-In-One SEO plugin used only 1.05 MB.
- Switching themes had almost no impact on memory usage.
- With as little as two domains using WordPress on DreamHost you are already reaching the upper limits of memory allocated. So much for unlimited domains. Perhaps they should rephrase it to unlimited unused domains?
- DreamHost has a serious LOAD AVERAGE problem. The numbers in the above screen capture were the lowest I captures. Often the Load Averages exceeded 10.
Even though I went looking for answers on memory usage, the load average numbers jumped out at me. What do they mean and what is a good number?
The article Understanding Linux CPU Load – when should you be worried? is a great tutorial on the topic. It makes the case that the maximum load should not exceed the number of cores on the server. My DreamHost server has 4 cores. I monitored this number all day and it is always in the red zone. The CPU load on DreamHost servers is excessive.
My advice is to stay away from DreamHost. Their servers are overloaded and if you plan to host more than one WordPress account you’ll experience problems.
UPDATE (Nov 25, 2010) – This morning the DreamHost Load times spiked much higher!
- Load Averages: 144.95 45.93 21.12
We’ve been using DH for quite some time. Started out on the standard $8.95/mo deal, worked out very well until we actually (as you stated) started using domains – not just parked unused sites. One of the issues we ran up against very quickly was response time. Using Pingdom on our DH account allowed us to see the response times were very erratic – but on average, ended up being a huge issue. DH offered a killer deal on a VPS, which effectively brought our monthly to double the standard Unlimited account price. So, we use WP on DH VPS and don’t have too much hassle. We recently moved several of our sites off to RackSpace Cloud to test the response times and stability. In the last 2 weeks (14 days) we have the following stats:
DH Server: 99.21% uptime, 27 downtimes, 2h 45m downtime cumulative
RS Cloud: 100% uptime, 0 downtimes, 0 downtime cumulative
I am curious how this will pan out as the RS server gets more loaded and traffic’d, but 2 hours of downtime in 14 days seems excessive – and I remind you we’re on the DH VPS service.
I have appreciated the Live Chat help that DH offers, so that has staved off a complete exodus… But there is something afoot in the handling of their network. I am a big fan of both DH and RS, that is why we keep our business at both.
@Thomas – DreamHost does have an excellent control panel and responsive customer service. For me the DreamHost VPS is not an option, as there are better hosts at that price point. I also don’t like how they overload their servers to force you into their VPS plan. Seems deceptive.
Thanks for the feedback.
Same happened to me. “procwatch” killed my PHP process for having reach the RAM limit authorized by Dreamhost. I have to do the troubleshooting myself (been two days already: still waiting for an answer from support). I didn’t know about those memory plugin: that’s actually a great idea. DO you know if they record logs of memory usage for later examination? I can’t always be watching my dashboard to see what’s happening. Also, BlueHost (recommended hosting solution by WordPress.org) do not run a killer deamon such as “procwatch”. They told me: “Where if the account starts taking up to much CPU that they could damage other users, we move them to a quarantined section of the server, they actually can experience increased performance there..” I have no experience with them but will gladly give them a try if things do not improve with Dreamhost.
@Paul – Chasing down the memory issues was a nightmare. I never could figure it out. WordPress plugins do have memory spikes. Bluehost throttles instead of killing, which is a better solution IMO. My personal blog runs on BLUEHOST. Much better than DreamHost.
Use this link if you switch to BlueHost. I’ll get a little referral.
http://www.bluehost.com/track/digitalcolony
Ah! Good to know you’re having a satisfying experience at BlueHost. I just got an email from Dreamhost support, telling me the samething as usual: check your plugins, etc. My plugins haven’t changed for a while (over a year) except usual updates. Maybe an update broke everything, but I doubt it. The minute I got this email, I went to my dashboard to see if I could deactivate more plugins. Guess what? The site immediately slowed down to a halt. Two weeks ago, Dreamhost moved my installation from one server to another because I was experiencing abnormal down times (more than three hours during the same week). For some reason, they do not take that into consideration when trying to troubleshoot my current issue. Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
Out of curiosity, did you compared the load averages between Dreamhost and BlueHost?
@Paul – When I first joined BlueHost, I did. The numbers were much better. However, the problem with WP plugins is the spikes and not the average. Chasing those spikes proved to be impossible, so I left DreamHost.
DreamHost also had the habit of scheduling server maintenance during weekday business hours. BlueHost has never done that.
Nice to know! Dreamhost support can be painful at times: they do not answering very specific questions (not even acknowledging you aks something) and keep trying to push me towards VPS (I would like first to know what’s the problem, but it doesn’t seem to be that important to them). In the meantime, though, I learn a lot, mostly by running the “top” command via SSH on my shared server (which displays the kind of information you get from those memory plugins). There are also a couple of interesting logs to explore, mainly the access log, the error log and the ressource log. That being said, if the problem is not resolved by the week-end, I’ll move. BackupBuddy makes the migration process quite easy. Thanks again for the feedback!