Rouge Amoeba has a post up with some pretty solid advice on things to con­sider with a web host. This whole topic was spurred by the sched­uled power outage at Dreamhost.com that went ter­ri­bly wrong.

• Expe­ri­ences In Web Host­ing

I found this par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing since I was one of the many people who got caught up in Dreamhost’s outage. This site was down for what seemed like the better part of Sat­ur­day and Sunday. I was still seeing some inter­mit­tent flak­i­ness Sunday night and Monday morn­ing with the mysql server.

A look at the com­ments on Dreamhost’s status blog shows that there are a lot of really pissed off people about this.

• Power Outage Update
• Resid­ual net­work issues still

I does really suck to have your site down for a pro­longed period of time. That said, I’m not really very pissed off about this. I pay about $8 a month for the ser­vice. I get every­thing I could want to play with. They are very respon­sive and fast with the changes and updates. Also, I get almost unlim­ited band­width. I don’t really see much to com­plain about here.

If I was host­ing a com­mer­cial site where I was rely­ing on income from the actual web­site, I would be pan­icked. Then again, if I was run­ning a com­mer­cial site, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t be host­ing it with Dreamhost. In web host­ing, reli­a­bil­ity is what costs the big bucks.