If you’re reading this, I’ve successfully transferred apocryph.org to DreamHost from CI Host. I pay about one fourth of what CI Host was charging me, and I get sysadmins who know their ass from a hole in the ground (note to CI Host: your security and DNS guys are utter fuckwits).

The move was a breeze. I used rsync -avx [src] celatrix.com:[destpath] to copy over my gallery and drupal folders (including 26GB of Gallery photos). I had a little trouble getting Gallery and Drupal running, but only due to my own stupid mistakes. I did have to download and build a statically-linked version of ffmpeg for Gallery, since DreamHost doesn’t include it in their standard server build, but it was a non-event. mysqldump was a no-brainer; I moved my Gallery and Drupal databases in a couple minutes.

I do wish DreamHost’s DNS was a bit better; I want webmail.apocryph.org to redirect to the Google Apps for Domains URL for my apocryph.org webmail, but they hard-code webmail to alias to their own web mail offering, with no ability to turn it off. Other than that, I’ve had no complains so far.

It’s really nice to have 400GB of breathing room; I can’t believe it’s so cheap. I keep waiting for the catch, but I’ve not found it yet.

UPDATE : OK, the honeymoon didn’t last too long. apocryph.org was down all day yesterday, due to the following litany of problems:

• First, the server hosting apocryph.org went down inexplicably. I opened a support ticket, and got this response:

  Hey there Adam,

  I took a look at your site, and it looks like it’s back up. It looks like the server your site’s on was having issues earlier, and ended up needing a complete reboot about 20 minutes ago. It could have been an abusive user, or a high load on the server. I’m assuming one of our admins resolved it. I’ll keep an eye on it to see if I can stop this from happening again. If you have any more question, please let me know, and I’ll see what I can do to help.

  That’s awesome. How often is that going to happen, in the middle of the day, on a weekday?

• Second, the aliases I setup to serve the gallery2 and drupal content, which take ten minutes to apply according to the DreamHost control panel, took hours. Here’s the support reply (note: the first attempt at describing this problem was misunderstood as a question about the Alias directive in httpd.conf):

  Hello,

  Its possible that the server was slow to update the apache instance and thus it took longer to take effect,usually it takes about an hour or so. Sorry for my misunderstanding of your initial email. I am glad to hear its working for you. If there is anything else I can help with let me know.

  So, it usually takes an hour, despite the panel saying ten minutes, and it in fact took multiple hours? What’s going on over there?

• Third, the subdirectory remapping thing has a huge caveat:

  Note also that PHP scripts in remapped sub-directories - within your own home directory - can only run with the server’s default PHP version, which is presently PHP 4.4.2. Software that requires PHP 5 cannot run in a remapped directory.

  Um..lame!

So, while I’m not ready to claim the refund yet, I no longer deify DreamHost, and if these shitty experiences continue, I may have to beg CI Host to take me back.