It seems like all my blog article ideas lately come from my clients, so here’s another one. A client got an invitation to try out DreamHost PS (Private Servers) and wanted to know whether he should sign up.

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.

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill