Normally my clients use DreamHost for hosting, and they usually just sign up for a regular old shared hosting plan. So far, I haven’t had anyone who has the need for more bandwidth than their regular hosting plans offer.

However I did switch my own website hosting plan over to PS around a year ago as an experiment. I was having enough downtime to bug me, perhaps getting notifications that my site was down from Web-Stat a few times a month. I also knew that how often my website went down was heavily dependent on which server I was on. I think I asked to be moved, which they did, but for some reason, I still was having downtime that bugged me.

So I switched to PS, which did indeed cut down on my downtime. It’s a bit more expensive, but since my business is web design, having a website that’s up as much as possible is important to me.

However, I also have other clients who pretty much never have downtime and they have a regular hosting plan – so I do think that it depends on who your server neighbors are and what they are doing to impact your server’s performance.

So I told my client that if he was experiencing downtime that bugged him, he could give the PS a whirl, but otherwise to stay where he was. The PS does require users to check their usage and to make adjustments, which for most of my website clients is the last thing on their minds. If you’ve moved from standard DreamHost shared hosting to PS, let me know what you think.

Website hosting, like many other things in life, is not guaranteed to have 100% uptime. There may be times when your website is down, or loading slowly. If you are using DreamHost as your website hosting company, it’s a simple matter to submit a support ticket to find out what’s up and get whatever may be causing the issue resolved. This article assumes you are using DreamHost.com for your website hosting company. (Note, if you’re reading this, you’re NOT on DreamHost’s website, you’re reading my blog. I am a completely different company, Aldebaran Web Design, I am not DreamHost.com)

Update: DreamHost now offers Live Chat!

Follow these steps to notify DreamHost that your website is down or slow:

1. Log In. Log into your DreamHost control panel at: http://www.dreamhost.com. Enter the email address you used when you signed up for hosting and your password under the “Customer Login” section.

2. Click on Support -> Contact Support. This is on the lower left-hand corner of the navigation.

3. Select “Website” and “Next”. Notice there are other things you select here too. The support is not just for notifying them of website down issues, but everything connected with your hosting account.

4. Select your domain and “Next”. If you have an online store, you may see your domain listed twice. One is actually the “http” version and the other is the “https” version. Go ahead and check both.

5. Continue through the process with “Next” until you get to the Pick a Category.

6. Pick a Category and “Next”. Highlight whichever issue fits your situation. Site down or site slow are good choices if your site is not coming up.

7. Submit Support Ticket and “Send Message Now” . Fill out the following info: Name, Email, Subject, Message, Relevant URL, Request Type (be truthful here, if your site is down, the “OMG, People are Dying” is appropriate, but if it’s not this serious, then pick a less dramatic type).

You should expect to get a response from DreamHost anywhere from a few minutes, to a day…depending on what day and time you submitted your support ticket. I’ve had extremely good luck with this system, and literally every single support request that I’ve submitted for myself, or on behalf of my clients, has been resolved in a timely manner.

Phone Support:

DreamHost offers phone support. If you check the box for phone support, they will charge you a monthly fee of $9.95 and they offer a fixed number of calls per month. Note that they call you, not the other way round. Typically I don’t need phone support because their email support is fast and often resolves my issues. But if you want to talk to them on the phone, you need to click this option and fill out the times you want them to call you. If you’ve activated this, remember you’ll need to deactivate it after your issue is resolved, otherwise you’ll continue to be charged the extra monthly fee.

(Note to people who read this blog article and call my business: DreamHost does NOT HAVE A PHONE NUMBER you can call. If you call me demanding a phone number, I can’t give it to you because they don’t have a phone number to call. It doesn’t exist. Follow the steps in this article to contact them online and submit a call-back request. Even if you ask me for the phone number three times, I can’t give it to you because, again, I don’t have it, it doesn’t exist.)

One of the most wonderful things about having your WordPress blog hosted on DreamHost, is the ease of keeping your WordPress blog up-to-date. This is a quick tutorial on how to use the DreamHost one-click-installation feature to keep your blog version current. This article assumes you used the DreamHost one-click-installation to install your WordPress blog using the Advanced Mode.

1. Log into your DreamHost control panel: https://panel.dreamhost.com.

2. Goodies: On the left hand side, click on “Goodies” and then on “One Click Installs”.

3. Select A Method: Click on “Upgrade or remove previously installed software – Advanced mode”.

4. Upgrade: Under the column “Actions” you’ll either see “Already…” meaning you’ve already installed the latest version, or you’ll see “Upgrade….”. Click Upgrade.

5. Finish: DreamHost will upgrade WordPress to the latest released version, and send you an email when it’s completed. There will be a link in the email you need to click on, that will upgrade your blog’s database if needed.

6. Plugins: The upgrade process may deactivate your plugins, so it’s a good idea to log into your WordPress admin area and check to see that all the plugins are activated. Sometimes not all plugins are compatible with all versions of WordPress – so it’s good to check this out. The new version of WordPress (2.5) has a auto plugin updater – which make this process really simple.

When you change from one website designer to another, it’s important to change your FTP password. FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”, and its the way web designers upload and download files between their personal computers and your website server. When you change website designers, it’s important to prevent the old designer from accessing your website, whether you parted on good terms or not – better safe than sorry.

Here are the steps:

1. Log into your DreamHost control panel at : https://panel.dreamhost.com.

2. Access the User Accounts section. You can do this either by clicking on “Users” and then “Manage Users” in the left hand navigation. You can also do this by clicking on “Create User Accounts” in the main area.

3. Manage Users. At the top of the window, it should now say “Manage Users” and typically you’ll see just one user listed.

• Username: This is found under the column labeled “user”.
• Password: Click “Edit” and you will see fields for new password, or to let DreamHost pick a password for you. (I recommend letting DreamHost do this for you so the password is nice and secure). Simply enter the new password, and click “Save Changes”.

If you simply want to know what your current FTP password is, you’ll need to send DreamHost a support ticket to turn on this display. Once they activate it, your current FTP password will show up in the “Edit” area under Manage Users.

Remember that to access DreamHost servers via FTP, you don’t  need to put the “ftp://” just the domainname.com will work. (This is at least true for DreamWeaver, not sure for other FTP programs). Also remember that DreamHost stores website files in a subdirectory that’s the domain name: “yourdomainname.com.”  So if your website is mywidgets.com, the folder name is mywidgets.com

You’ve selected DreamHost as your hosting company and now you need to configure Outlook Express to read your email from your website. Here are the necessary 5 steps to configure Outlook. If you need to configure Outlook Express, please read this article on how to set up Outlook Express.

(These instructions were taken from DreamHost’s article on setting up Outlook, with screen shots and extra tips added by me.)

(Leave “Log on using Secure Password Authentication” unchecked).

Click “More Settings.”

That’s it, you’re done. Click “OK“, and “Finish“.

(If you’re not a client and you found this article helpful, please do leave me a short comment so that I’ll be encouraged to continue writing tutorials like this one.)

You’ve selected DreamHost as your hosting company and now you need to configure Outlook Express to read your email from your website. Here are the necessary 10 steps to configure Outlook Express. If you need to configure Outlook, please read this article on how to set up Outlook.

(The following instructions are taken from DreamHost’s article on setting up Outlook Express with little extra helpful hints and graphics added.)

4. Enter your email address that’s from your new website domain that’s being hosted by DreamHost. Click “Next“.

5. For this section, you’ll be setting how Outlook interacts with DreamHost’s email server. If you select “POP3″, Outlook will remove emails from the DreamHost email server when you launch Outlook. If you select “IMAP”, Outlook will synchronize your Outlook inbox and DreamHost’s server. This means as long as you leave the messages in your Outlook inbox, they will stay on DreamHost’s server. You should select “IMAP” if you want to be able to access your email remotely, when you are away from your computer, but have access to the internet.

For the “Incoming mail server” and “Outgoing mail server“, simply put in “mail.yourdomain.com“, replacing the yourdomain.com with your actual domain name. Pay attention to this, many folks make this error…use YOUR actual domain name. For example, if I was doing this, I would put mail.aldebaranwebdesign.com When done, click “Next“.

Then in the “Password” field, enter your DreamHost email password. Usually Jill will have sent this to you.

Leave the “Secure Password Authentication” unchecked.

Click “Next“.

href=”http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Outlook_Express”>DreamHost’s article on setting up Outlook Express with little extra helpful hints added.)

Enter “INBOX.” in the “Root folder path” and check “check for new messages in all folders”. Don’t forget to add the period at the end of INBOX. Set the “Special Folders” as shown in the example below. Click “Apply” and “OK”.

That’s it, you’re finished!
You should confirm that everything is set up correctly by sending an email, receiving an email and replying to an email from this new account.

(If you’re not a client and you found this article helpful, please do leave me a short comment so that I’ll be encouraged to continue writing tutorials like this one.)