Oh, I used to use Hostgator. I had a fairly mixed set of experiences with them.

I’m still a fan of DreamHost. I wouldn’t keep my personal projects and family websites there if I wasn’t a fan. And I missed their technical support A LOT when we were at ServerBeach. We are getting more personal service from HostExpress because I think its a smaller business, with a much smaller user base. But overall, DreamHost rocks

Now, if I can only understand what it would take to get people like you and other bloggers to contribute to our wiki. We are renaming the wiki Infomosa.com - we haven’t activated the forwarding yet, but we figure to see if it will/can stand on its own outside of Taiwanease. We originally we were going to use the MediaWiki platform for all of Taiwanease - but this proved unwieldy and unnecessary.

I’m still a believer in Wikis and I use Wikipedia all the time (as a reader, not a contributor). But I haven’t had any success getting on for Taiwan to take hold

Thanks for sharing so much about the technical side of what you’re working on. I’m also going to have to think hard about whether if Dreamhost is the best place to be or not. So far, my experience with them has been great. But, I’m still in my first month of using them.

Last month, there was a particularly bad spell. The new Control Panel I have on DreamHost was preceded by a major outage that lasted 2 or 3 days. It was fascinating reading the comments of DHers whose businesses depend on uptime - some were second line web hosts (resellers) left completely in the dark. I recalled what it was like when we were one of these guys, wondering, waiting, hoping, and thinking, “this simply ain’t worth it”

We learned the hard way that discussion forums are terrible Adsense income generators. Search phpBB.com and discover this for yourself. We only did after scratching our heads why the Forum traffic wasn’t translating into Adsense clicks.

In our experience we had Taiwanted (then known as the Forumosafieds) and Forumosa running Adsense ads the same time - Forumosa was receiving 10x (TEN TIMES) the Adsense exposure as the Classifieds, yet where was 90% of our Adsense income coming from? The classifieds. It was a very powerful differential - we figure that those who use Forumosa are mostly there to read what is there (they don’t want to click away to another website), and those who use Taiwanted are mostly there to browse around. It sounds pretty obvious now. So if you want to advertise your stuff on the Forums, design your message as something that will add to the reader’s interest, or give them something they can use inside Taiwan (90% of our readers are based inside Taiwan)

Today, we are in the midst of changing the HTML templates of our forum to accomodate more ads. We’d rather use put ads to Taiwanted than Adsense on the Forums. It serves Forumosans much better since these are more relevant. It doesn’t make us any extra money, but that was never what Forumosa was all about. And besides, Adsense in phpBB is negligible.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the downtimes that have been plaguing Dreamhost? I’ve been reading Sinosplice every day and haven’t noticed any disruptions so far.

It didn’t occur to me that someone would refuse to write in a wiki because we run our sponsors ads on it. This gives us something to think about - it isn’t the first time we’ve set up a wiki (actually, it’s the 3rd time), but it doesn’t seem to have taken hold.

In case anyone is interested, the following is our story about our costings that I have told many times - I used to have it on our blog but it’s archived now since we are changing our banner rates.

We were a DreamHost shared host website once upon a time (our blog is still on DreamHost btw). But they actually forced us to choose - get our own server on their network or leave. Forumosa was slowing down their other shared accounts - this was 3 years ago.

At the time, we didn’t think we could justify the jump to their dedicated-server plans, so we left for inexpensive hosting at ServerBeach. But I missed DreamHost’s support. When we made the decision to upgrade our server to handle our needs, we planned to go back to DreamHost at $500 a month - and by then, we were sure our sponsors would support the move.

At the last minute, we took a bid from our present host - HostExpress.com - who offered us a little bit more for the same price. We’ve been pretty happy ever since - and haven’t had the downtime problems that have plagued DreamHost of late

Dreamhost is good for limited shared hosting, but the problem with those isn’t the bandwidth or storage limitation but rather the CPU and RAM limit, which for a site running an open-source CMS (like Drupal, Joomla etc.) can be a mess with over 2000 visitors a day. If you’re only running a blog or a very small-size website (with caching), then you should be okay.

If you’re doing more than that - no matter how good your caching is, and how well optimized your DB is, you will be required to move to a VPS or a dedicated server which will bring up costs to 39-150US$ per month (and that’s hard to cover with ads). Excessive server resource usage on shared hosting could cause account suspension without notice.

Biggest problem with Dreamhost is that they only respond to queries by email, and sometimes only after more than 24 hours, and it wouldn’t be wise to run a serious site with that kind of service (I do like their referrals model, though).

Just my 2 cents.