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When I launched Old Red Pen, I chose GoDaddy for one reason only: it was cheap. Once I started the process of deploying my Ruby on Rails-based site onto their servers, I immediately regretted my decision. But at that point, I had already paid for a year of hosting, so I was reluctant to go looking again.
It took a lot of finaggling to get Rails running correctly on GoDaddy’s servers at the root level (why would anyone want to run an application in anything but a subdirectory, right?), and their support knew nothing about Rails. Once it was finally running, it was slow. FastCGI is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, it’s faster than just CGI, but it’s really just a lot of CGI processes running at once. Sometimes I’d see load times approaching a full minute. Yeah, bad news.
Then a friend mentioned a sale at DreamHost. The sale was actually good enough that it didn’t matter that I had already paid for a year of GoDaddy hosting a month and a half prior. So I bit.
And then another two months passed.
And GoDaddy got slower and slower. And then I had a several hour outage during the middle of the day after I had posted a link to the site on StumbleUpon. 10% of the clicks were making it through to my site. I called GoDaddy, and they fixed it, but that night I begain working toward migrating my site to DreamHost.
There are always gotchas in deployments, but most of them this time around were me forgetting stupid things I already knew. DreamHost’s control panel is gorgeous and funny and well-designed (in stark contrast to GoDaddy’s complicated, incohesive and ugly series of different panels).
And the major benefit to hosting my Ruby on Rails application on DreamHost is that it uses Passenger—with a click of a button! Passenger is a much better way of running Ruby on Rails. And not even having to set up was even nicer.
In conclusion, DreamHost kicks the pants off GoDaddy. If I’ve convinced you, and you’re interested in getting your own DreamHost account, I’d greatly appreciate it if you would use me as your referral. And actually, to make it worth it for you, sign up with the promo code OLDREDPEN, and you’ll get a free domain registration for life, and $20 off any hosting plan (will show up at checkout).
