The so called problems reported by Dreamhost are exactly the same as those I’ve seen from other hosts, who several times stopped my websites for alleged “ressource hogging”. I always told them I would look at the problem, but could never find any, an then just went on as before. Without complaints now. Most of these webhosts have so few real experts who can diagnose problems, that they just make a wild guess and name you as the culprit. I have experienced this at least six times with two different sites and two different hosts. Who should have the ability to diagnose an eventuel problem, if not the webhost with all their logs and unlimited access. But of course it takes an experienced technician to make sense of it.

@ Tino:

Heh, I specifically picked the LTS distro so that I wouldn’t have to upgrade it until 2015. :P

I’m glad to see that the blog is up and running again! (you have changed server now, right?, at least yesterday’s errors are gone.)

@ Luke Maciak:
Actually, it was eons ago since I compiled a kernel. However, I am a big fan of being able to install my ubuntu kernel updates, and keep the distribution the latest one. That said, I’m sure Linode are serious enough to keep their kernels somewhat current, this is a bigger problem with cheaper hosts.

Thanks to everyone who recommended Linode here and on twitter. That’s what I ended up going with. :) There should be a post about it going up in a few minutes.

@ Ron:

That’s actually the setup I picked. Hopefully it will be enough. If not, I might need to buy more bandwidth.

@ Mart:

Ack, no throttling! I don’t want to deal with that anymore. Also, isn’t reddit down as much as it is because they are running on Amazon services? :P

I’m always scared of the per-usage billing schemes – they look reasonable, but I can’t help imagining them balooning out of control.

@ IceBrain:

Oh wow, nice. I wish Dreamhost had uptime guarantees like this. My hosting would be virtually free then. I went with Linode which I believe doesn’t have uptime guarantees but their support team seem very responsive.

@ k00pa:

Yep… My only concern is that I’m so used to just slapping wordpress instances on pre-configured shared hosting setups I am probably forgetting some crucial optimizations and/or security gotchas. Still, I got the site running in under a few hours. :)

I went with Ubuntu which is probably not the best choice in terms of memory footprint but… Well, I’ve been living in Debian/Ubuntu world since college, and I just did not feel like tying to deal with unfamiliar distro issues now that maintenance is on my head.

@ fundamental:

Yep, I’m loving the root access. Though it’s bizarre that their default Ubuntu image lets you ssh in as root. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I was root on Ubuntu – the magic of sudo usually is enough.

@ Gui13:

Heh, I don’t comprehend even a lick of French. I like how it sounds though.

To tell you the truth I’m fluent in Polish and English only. I studied Russian and German but since I have not used either since high school they are pretty much gone. I remember how to say horse in German – that’s about it. I used to be able to read Cyrylic alphabet (well, at least sound it out) but now that’s gone too. Can’t wait till we have non-volatile in-silico memory where we can permanently store shit like that.

But, when I opened the article Chrome helpfully suggested to translate it into English for me. I fucking love that feature. Also, their translation is getting better – almost everything made sense. Well, except the fact that the translation kept saying “hotel” when he meant location (as in physical data center) – but it was easy to figure out from context.

@ Justyn:

Oh wow, thanks for the offer! Seeing how this site get quite a bit of hits, I’d hate to hammer your server into the ground. Plus it’s nice to have a professional support team I can yell at if my stuff breaks or servers go down. Part of my problem with Dreamhost was shoddy support. I appreciate the offer though. Thanks!

@ rev:

I used them once for one of my freelancing web design gigs. It seemed fairly stable. I wasn’t a big fan of their panel. I mean it was perfectly functional, just had like a million things there that I could not care less about. Plus I don’t think they gave you SSH access which is pretty much a deal breaker for me (or maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough, and my client was to clueless to figure it out).

@ Tino:

I do like to play with things, but for stuff like this site I prefer stuff that works. I went with a standard Ubuntu image on Linode. Believe it or not, I am not a big fan of compiling my own kernel. I think I only did it like twice in my life (both times to get shitty wifi drivers to work) long time ago, and I have been perfectly happy running out of the box distros ever since. :)

You should seriously go with a VPS. Then, you don’t have to deal with BS like “clever killscripts”. As long as the company is serious enough to keep their boxes alive and connected to the Internet, the rest is up to you.

I was on VpsLink for a while, they were stable enough for me. Their cheapest plan is $7.95/mo, but that is a very memory starved config, so it may not work well with wordpress. (http/php is fine with lighttpd, but mysql may have it tough.)

If you want to find something cheaper than Linode’s $20/month you can check for offers at ‘Low end box’ or the digitalpoint web hosting forum.

But, if you like to play with things (and I know you do), I would seriously recommend looking for a Xen HVM VPS. This means that you can boot your own kernel. (Normally in XEN you have to go with a set of kernels provided by the hosting company, which means you cannot upgrade/change your distro however you want. And don’t even get me started on OpenVZ.)

I’m currently on a HVM with NordicVPS which I am reasonably happy with. However, I don’t see their HVM offers on the webpage any longer, so maybe they have stopped with them.

[Links redacted due to stupid spam filter, just google the company names to find them.]

i use hostgator.com; pretty happy, they fully support wordpress and have a pretty nice admin interface.

I used linode for a few months about a year ago, and loved it. They’re pretty cheap compared to other xen vps services. Like some of the other people here said, you can go with some sort of cloud service too.

Or if you’re interested, I can spin up a vps for you on a server I have colocated for 15-20/mo. I don’t sell hosting or anything, so it’s basically a really beefy server that I have a bunch of my personal low trafficked sites on.

If you can decypher a bit of French (or click the links on the second part of the article, for that matter), you can take a look here: http://www.bortzmeyer.org/apres-slicehost.html

This guy participated in pretty much every RFCs since the 2000’s, and has quite the same needs as you: USA provider, root access, VPS.

Another recommendation for Linode, no problems with support and it gives you plenty of control.
As k00pa said, you do need to do some of the management yourself, but it does give oneself a lot of flexibility (hooray root access).
Good luck in resolving the issue.
(hopefully this is not a double post as firefox failed to get the message to your server)

I would recommend Linode VPS. I have one Linode running for second month and it have been very stable.

VPS has the down side that you have to update/configure it yourself, not that big of a deal if you know what you do :P I actually like to configure it and get everything up and running. Atm I host my personal git repos there and TF2 server with HLStatsX:CE.

If VPS is not the option, I would consider something like Mediatemple. I have not tried it but it looks pretty good.