Dreamhost

Recently I’ve found myself using hosting services more and more.  In the past I’ve almost exclusively worked with dedicated servers sat in the same building right next to me. To my surprise it has actually been a pretty good experience…

I’m yet to compare to other hosting services, but the basic dreamhost account gives you access to some pretty advanced functionality – including cron, fully custom DNS management (with unlimited TXT records!), FTP, SSH etc etc. The only drawback I’ve found is when needing to use a php library that was unavailable. Despite hours of trying to solve things, it just wasn’t going to happen. Also it’s not fantastic that of course you’re on a shared IP and that it’s possible for that IP to change!

I’m currently intending to use dreamhost to serve bandwidth-heavy files and manage the DNS of my websites, but use my own dedicated server for anything with long lists of specific server requirements. Using a hosting service also offers a great opportunity to create backups up in the cloud where you can be pretty confident they’ll not be lost.