Comments on: Happy Birthday DreamHost

By: scotty

scotty — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 11:58:00 +0000

How do you "know" that a host is overselling?

You don't. Because they all do.

Even the ones that swear to Zarquon that they never ever oversell, at least one of their upstream ISP do anyway.

By: scotty

scotty — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 11:48:24 +0000

I too use unison to manage all my sites (including this one). Unison keeps a checksum of all files in a cache file under ~/.unison/, and I found when there are many files to manage, unison can be slow trying to work out what has changed and what hasn't.

So far it is alright -- I don't have many files on DreamHost, only large media files to take advantage of storage + data transfer. However I hope it will not be too slow when I need to sync many smaller files...

By: F Church

F Church — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 11:37:10 +0000

Unison is not so bad once after the initial sync. Only new files are uploaded, and changed ones are updated.

Unless video and music files are involved, there is only so much typing a human being can do in a day, hence updates are minimal.

I run Unison from batch files, and I find it quicker than opening an ftp client, looking up both source and dest directories and uploading.

I get the batch files, pick the -path I want to restrict to and let it run

By: Web Hosting Finds Guy Behind the Scenes

Web Hosting Finds Guy Behind the Scenes — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:00:56 +0000

I keep reading about hosts who are overselling. Any host that seems to offer a large amount of disk space and bandwidth is said to be overselling. How do you “know” that a host is overselling?

By: scotty

scotty — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 21:55:33 +0000

Many shared web hosting companies actually have TOS forbidding the storage used for backup purpose. Surprisingly DreamHost does not "yet" have that. I wonder whether it will change when more people take advantage of their massive storage and use them for offsite backups.

Is running unison slow for you? Sync'ing 100Mb of small files can take a long time for me...

By: F Church

F Church — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:42:13 +0000

On their lowest plan the space amounts to 4 cents a Gig. Compared with Amazon S3's 15 cents a Gig and it seems quite reasonable if they will allow you to fill it up. I guess the CPU overhead involved in managing that amount of storage might affect a users CPU allocation eventually

In the case of the dedicated servers I suppose the space taken up by a dedicated server is at worth at least $400 a month to them, so it has to be that high.

I have to admit liking the facilities offered by their shell access. It allows me full command line without having to bother about server administration.

Now if only they remain true to their space offerings and if running up to a dozen long running rsync or unison processes would not exceed the CPU quotas per account, I could put their space to good use as backup space for some of my stuff.

By: Jeff C. @ DreamHost

Jeff C. @ DreamHost — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:59:06 +0000

Thanks! :)

Jeff C. @ DreamHost