Hosting info & reviews.
Recently I wrote about the monitoring services from mon.itor.us that I use.
As I shifted the last of my sites from Dreamhost to a VPS I was wondering about some of the values I was seeing. For example here’s a fairly normal day in the life of a wordpress site hosted at Dreamhost.
If it’s not one thing it’s another at Dreamhost.
Like a lot of people I just forward all my email to Gmail, it’s got a great spam filter, plenty of storage, accessible via web, POP & IMAP, maybe the only downside is they can just de-activate your account without warning 
Recently my email seemed to stop working, on investigation it seemed that Dreamhost were still accepting the email however it wasn’t arriving at my Gmail account.
So I logged a ticket and got a reply 12 hours later saying they were aware of a slowness issue with email forwarding to Gmail and I would be updated when it was fixed.
Quoting: “Right now we are experiencing some slowdowns sending emails to Google’s GMail service.”
Days later still no news from my ticket, however earlier this week I got a test message that I had sent… last week.
Received: from staffnet.xxx.com.au (staffnet.xxx.com.au [203.x.x.x])
by spunkymail-mx5.g.dreamhost.com (Postfix)
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:07:59 -0800 (PST)Received: from brazilian.dreamhost.com ([66.33.209.64])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id k19si1079983rvb.2007.12.05.13.29.07;
Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:29:07 -0800 (PST)
6 days 
Thankfully I was in the process of moving the last of my hosting away from them.
So like a good admin I graph various hosts of mine and recently looking through one of the graphs sets I noticed this.
The hourly spikes are just webmin / virtualmin doing bandwidth calcs and stats generation, other than that it’s not a loaded box, so it was suprising to see an extended period of load.
A quick hunt through the logs shows that it appears to be due to some infected system trying to brute force SSH login.
I usually secure SSH in a number of ways:
So now I’ve added to the list and set the SSH Daemon to listen on a port other than 22, it stops the door knockers and I don’t have to run any other active log watching or monitoring software.
Quite a while ago I setup an account at mon.itor.us and recently I was looking at the various stats that they are producing, not too bad for a freebie
Here’s an example of the recent http response times for my website. Click to continue »
A lot of people ask me where I host my sites. Well a lot of them are hosted at Dreamhost.
One of the guys at work referred me to them 18 months ago and I’ve been using them ever since. One day soon I’ll write a full review but in the meantime a few people have recently asked me for Dreamhost referral codes or referrer codes to get a discount when signing up.
So I’ve created a code that gives you $50 USD discount when joining for a year, that brings your first year down to something like $70USD which is a bargain for what you get.
When signing up for your first account with Dreamhost use the promo code: JOSEPHBURFORD1
It helps you and it helps me! Hope this isn’t too much like spam
