Dreamhost is failing me, especially with email. I don't enjoy missing emails and my customers don't enjoy it either - especially when the email they're waiting for includes a registration file for something they've just bought.

I have redundancy with my online ordering thankfully. Each order generates a record with the payment gateway (PayPal in this instance), gets logged to a database on the server (which I dont have a nice UI for yet). I also get an email directly from PayPal about the transaction and generate a CC of the license email that goes to the customer. So for every order I expect 2 emails to come in to my mailboxes.

So many times the license ones don't come through and I'm stuck manually forwarding them. And every now and then a license will come through and I won't get the notification from PayPal.

Of course this doesn't touch on the number of times the whole POP/SMTP server has been down completely in the past 2 months nor that every now and then when I send mail it gets bounced because the receiver's server says the Dreamhost IP is blacklisted for 24 hours by Spamcop.

I'd love to transition everything over to a new host. Some requirements:

Some type of Shell access (through SSH)
A decent control panel for managing email addresses and other configuration stuff.
At least 1TB of bandwidth per month.
Can't break the bank. I think Dreamhost was $150 for the year or so.
Fast backbone connections (yes more than one required)

When I'm ready for something like dedicated or co-located I'll do that, but right now I'm just looking for shared hosting with decent performance and more all-around up-time than Dreamhost. I can't afford dedicated hosting at this time and I don't think the demands of our site require it in the least right now.

Any recommendations?

No recommendations? Really?

Today we're missing even more mail and I'm starting to get scared I'll lose track of sending out licenses for the software. An automated process is only so good as the system it runs on - and Dreamhost obviously runs on pretty flaky stuff.

Can anyone recommend 1&1? They sure have enormous ads in Business 2.0.

I'm in the same boat. I'm doing an average of 60-70 sales per day, and when dreamhost goes down, all hell breaks loose. They really were a dream host, until they started having all of the downtime. I'm tired of it.

wow.. 1TB a month? that's > 3mbit of sustained traffic.. I suppose at $150/month for the hosting, that covers the bandwidth.

I'm trying to get a blade server system up and running.. going to rent out the blades for $50/month including basic (.5mbit, aka 150GB) bandwidth. I'm having some trouble getting all the RLX documentation and software together

My partners are currently setting up on 1and1 and love it. The email server has a high latency time, but works flawlessly.

We were using Terrasite (windows only), which were good, but high priced if you exceeded their bandwith. Cruznet.net (unix only) has unlimited bandwidth for only $30/month, but the mail is not the most reliable thing, and they have no control panels, you have to call them for everything.

I'm also now looking at Media Temple which a lot of high-traffic blog sites use. I don't currently transfer enough content to burn 1TB, but I'm thinking of the future here. I don't want to go jumping host to host every 3 or 4 months. Just with the first small program we have now we push over 1GB per day on its download alone (the file is 1.5MB). And that was before being hit by the Register, and Engadget.

1TB a month? that's > 3mbit of sustained traffic.

Can you show me how to work that math? I worked it out using guesses in place of knowledge, and came up with > 3kbit, and am wondering what I did wrong. Here's what I tried...

1 TB = 8 Tb, or 8x10^9 Tb

8x10^9 divided by 30.5 (avg.) days/month =~ 2.6x10^8

2.6x10^8 divided by 24 (hours/day) =~ 1.1x10^7

1.1x10^7 divided by 3600 (seconds/hour) =~3.1x10^3, or without benefit of rounding in the intermediate steps, 3035 bits/second.

Since I am not at all confident of my assumed relationship of TB and Tb, and not even sure of what is meant by "sustained traffic", no doubt I have made some grievously invalid assumptions.

Will someone who is as much of a math nerd as I am show me the error(s) of my ways?

tanstaafl.

I don't know if this is a common thing to do or not, but whenever I do that sort of math, I do it as a huge series of fractions multiplied together, the first few of which are the initial data. Then you can do a bunch of cancelling and be left with a number of numberators to be multiplied together and a number of denominators to be multiplied together.

Like this:

Code:

---

  1TB     1024GB   1024MB   8Mb   1 month    1 day       1 hour      1 minute
------- * ------ * ------ * --- * ------- * -------- * ---------- * ----------
1 month    1TB      1GB     1MB   30 days   24 hours   60 minutes   60 seconds

---

So then you can cancel units that appear on both the top and bottom, which leaves you with:

Code:

---

1   1024   1024   8Mb   1    1    1        1
- * ---- * ---- * --- * -- * -- * -- * ----------
1    1      1      1    30   24   60   60 seconds

---

Which then leaves you with:

Code:

---

   1024 * 1024 * 8 Mb
-------------------------
30 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds

---

or:

Code:

---

   8388608Mb
---------------
2592000 seconds

---

or (about):

Code:

---

3.24 Mbps

---

1 TB = 8 Tb which is 8x10^12

Doh!

Thanks!

tanstaafl.

It's a good thing you work in radio instead of rocket science, Doug.

On the other hand, don't you have to do a certain amount of money management in your job?

(I know, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones... I avoid math like the plague.)

i've said it before and i'll say it again:

www.1and1.com

http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/Hosters?tn=august_2006

1and1 seems to be the best.

I can 2nd that. I have used 1and1 for years and no complaints here.