Dreamhost

You may have noticed that mindjunk and its various subdomains were acting odd over the past week. I finally have gotten so fed up with Powweb that I moved everybody over to Dreamhost. It is amazing how much better Dreamhost is than Powweb. Lets look at what I can do now under my new host that I couldn't do back on Powweb.

1. SSH Access
• Yea, thats right Powweb doesn't offer any form of shell access. If you go on the forums and complain you will be promptly told that you can do everything with php scripts so there is no need for ssh access. I guess writing up a script and executing it via browser is okay for some people but for me... it is just no comparison to having direct access to a command line.
2. Ruby Support
   • I love ruby. It is just an absolute joy to program in. The people over at powweb felt adding ruby support to their servers wasn't a very high priority. I am glad Dreamhost disagrees. Not only is ruby installed we all get access to gems.
3. Email uses the same storage space as your webserver
   • This one may seem silly but over at powweb your email space is seperate from your webhosting space. You may have 19G space free but your email address can only hold 25mb of messages. It is possible to call powweb support and get them to increase the space of a single mailbox but my experience is they will only increase it to 300mb. How dreamhost has it setup just makes more sense.

You can read about the event that caused me to drop powweb over on their forums. Here was my original post:

I have spent twenty hours now trying to get my new domain working. Not to mension the fact I have called support three times one of which I was hung up on mid sentence. To say I am past it would be a understatement. My brain feels like it is falling out of my head! (I don't mean I have worked on on this for over 20 hours, it was actually over 48 hours... I have actually worked on this for a solid 20 hours)

I bought a second domain name through powweb yesterday. I am going to settup my guilds website in a subfolder. This should be easy right? Domain purchase went through very easy (suprise! services that involve you losing money work perfectly). So while I am waiting for domain registration to go through I am going to set up my site under a subdomain of my main domain. I throw up a base civicspace distro under /mystic/htdocs and point a subdomain (mystic.mindjunk.org) at it and spend a few hours configuring things and working converting civicspace from a political site to a guild management site.

Unfortunatly my site is one of the few the proud the ugly who got caught up in that slowness glitz so here I am trying to reconfigure this webapp that is classically kinda slow as it is and its requiring page refresh after another which each one is coming in at 20 second loads. After awhile of this I get ticked off and go to bed, plus its 3 in the morning at this point.

Next day I notice my domain is up! The mega lag is still there but whatever I will work on this later. Right now lets move over the civic space to the new domain. Hmmm its pointing at username.powweb.com the same place my mindjunk.org domain is pointing. I wonder where in the cpanel I can change that. Look around for a few hours try and read the faqs forum and knowledge base come up with I need to use htaccess and rewrite rules. Okay I come up with some code to throw into the htaccess file which rewrites mysticdragons.net urls to http://mystic.mindjunk.org. Test... its redirecting the browser not rewriting. Hmmmm thats odd. Later I find out that adding a domain in the front with http:// forces redirection instead of internal loading. But that doesnt come till way later.

We are at about 6 hours of fighting with my new domain now. Why is this so hard? Back to the story. I start to wonder how to form the sytax to point to a folder that is above the htdocs folder because my subdomain is at /mystic/htdocs and my default enterence is /htdocs so I guess it would have to be like ../mystic/htdocs that idea doesn't last long because more research reveals that powweb has a tool that lets you point a domain at at subdomain! Great where is it where can I get it you may ask!? Well it costs money... I think WTF I pay 15$ for a domain and its useless unless I pay a extra 27$ to link it with a subdomain? So what was that 15$. Basically much more pissed off research follows.

I call support and he seems to think its is how I have my directory set up and makes a attempt at moving my dir around and putting some rewrite stuff in and it didn't work. (One of the later support people tells me that its against company policy to fudge with our htaccess files so they cant help us... please dont punish this kid he was the ONLY helpful support guy I talked to all day.) He also says that they know about the slowness and his management told him not to elevate anymore calls about this. I am cool with that, I understand stuff goes wrong.

I go back to work on trying alternate set ups for the rewrite rules based on information I find across the web. After four more hours I call again. This is the guy that hangs up on me. He tells me he can't help because he can't mess with the htaccess files. Then tells me about this pay service that I know about it. I ***** about having to pay twice to get a working domain name. He puts me on hold for about 15 minutes to go talk to his supperiors... he comes back and gets me to go to the "URL Redirection" page in the cpanel. Midway through me saying I don't think this is the thing that I am looking for he hangs up on me. Oh did I mension I had to wait a hour on hold just to talk to him in the first place?

Okay so now I am fuming... I dont know what hour I am at in my journey but I call back and wait another hour to get through the bad music to a support rep. This guy was the antithesis of the first. He treated me like I knew crap and kept repeating redirction=internal. The ONLY way I have gotten the rewrite rules to work so far is by putting a domain name in the rewrite rule. Which as I said earlier isn't stealth it actually redircts the browser. Ugh he was so unhelpful. "Go to google and type htaccess redirect" >_< Okay at this point I try moving all my contents into the htdocs and working on rules with that setup. Something goes wrong during the move and I lose half the system file supporting the civicspace install. I can't really say I am was mad at this point. More like defeated. I try more to create htaccess rules. Little is figured out at this point because I am completely losing it.

So here I am 20 hours and 3 support calls later with out a working civicspace installation and a new domain name still pointing at the wrong place. I have't been able to convince dreamhost to drop the 50$ setup fee but maybe I can borrow some money from a friend. I probably will regret writing all this in the morning.... but right now I am feeling quite justified in frustration. I think I will mail powweb with this pasted in it also, though I dont really feel like getting some stupid semiautomated responce telling be about the wonders of htaccess files.

username.powweb.com => /htdocs [came that way]
mindjunk.org => /htdocs [came that way]
mysticdragons.net => /htdocs/mystic/htdocs (But really its pointing to /htdocs) [htaccess]
mystic.mindjunk.org => /htdocs/mystic/htdocs [subdomain mapping]

I think its time for me to sleep....