Dreamhost wants to rival Amazon S3, Friday Lulz

I happened to login to Dreamhost Control panel today to setup email forwarding. I  have mentioned before that the Dreamhost hosting I have is so pathetic that now its even impossible to host simple non DB websites. Forget the DB websites all together. It is slow as frack. It’s completely and utterly useless and has been for over an year now. I still use it for email though. It’s the only thing that works best on DH and saves me the hassle of mailbox setup etc.

Anyway back to Dreamhost panel. So I see that Dreamhost prompted me to check out the “DreamObjects” which offers a 3 cent /GB storage cost for the promo. Sounds good? Well no mention of Data transfer charges so I dig into the details http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/pricing/ Rightly named. I too would “Object” to this because whatever happened to their unlimited space deal which we all have. Turns out the pricing isn’t bad. But hang on! We are talking about dreamhost here. They are like the crappiest of web hosting around today. They have a lot of their image to recover in my books before I can buy their claims into an S3 equivalent reliable, available and cost effective storage.

While in Singapore I can still download from my US east bucket at close to 10Mbps. The response times stay consistent, never lost an object in over 3.5 years even at reduced redundancy and S3 has a proven track record. My first impression is “Great! DreamHost is trying to reinvent itself.” soon followed by “Wait it’s dream host… dream on”.

Further it’s not really pay-as-use its still pre-paid plan. Without the promo it comes down to the following pricing which is definitely much lower than S3 and they “say” no cost on API request. If they are using their crappy servers to run this program on their already oversold network I am quite disappointed. Amazon S3 advertises it’s SLA and durability in the first product page http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#protecting. Unsurprisingly DreamHost has failed to mention any of that in clear writing.

Pre-paid Storage Plans:

PLAN

STORAGE INCLUDED (GB)

PLAN PRICE / MTH

EFFECTIVE RATE / GB

20GB

20

$1.35

6.8¢

100GB

100

$6.49

6.5¢

500GB

500

$29.95

6.0¢

1TB

1,024

$54.95

5.4¢

5TB

5,120

$269.95

5.3¢

10TB

10,240

$529.95

5.2¢

50TB

51,200

$2,499.95

4.9¢

100TB

102,400

$4,499.95

4.4¢

To be fair I will give this a shot. I will not however be using it as storage for any real projects even if they are the FUN kind of projects.  My only fear is that if in the entire industry , service providers like DreamHost start to promise something like S3 and fail to deliver it will only make AWS stronger and kill the potential up and coming competition.

Right now I am just angry at DreamHost. I’ll wave my fist at my monitor for a little while more.