Djangofriendly

I currently use Dreamhost to host several personal Django sites, including my personal site/blog http://patrickbeeson.com.

The hosting is cheap, and the space plentiful, but poor customer service and the inability to add or change much about the hosting environment are big negatives.

I plan to migrate away from Dreamhost when my contract expires.

I used to use Dreamhost. I like how they use Debian, their management panel is nice, they purchased carbon offsets, etc., which is all nice. But the version of MySQLdb they use is whatever is in Debian 3.1, and it's just not recent enough for Django trunk. If you can live with Django 0.96 you could use DreamHost, but not anything more recent.

I recently began hosting 2 Django sites on Dreamhost.

Now my sites have very small needs. I don't do any fancy processing.

With that disclaimer: It all works fine.

I will second jefurii's comment about MySQLdb. They have an old one, and if Django ever stops supporting it (it's already deprecated), then Dreamhost will simply be non-usable for anything that has models (i.e. any Django app). However, jefurii's statement is somewhat incorrect. You can use Dreamhost with the trunk versions of Django (thus far) - you just have to put down mysqldbold (or something similar) in the settings file to get MySQL to work.

Their Python version is not all that new (2.3), although they provide access to 2.4, and one can always compile 2.5 if one feels it necessary.

The biggest problem I see with Dreamhost is that not all their boxes are configured for long-running processes. It seems hit or miss. My personal site is still surviving on there (while I finish a new version on WebFaction) but I had sites for my old college newspaper die every few minutes with 500 errors, requiring a restart of the fcgi process. So it's likely fine to tinker with Django on Dreamhost, but if you require any bit of stability, stay far, far away.

I've migrated almost all of my sites away from Dreamhost because of the regular 500 errors that plague FCGI processes (apparently they employ a monitoring process that occasionally kills them).

Also, it's not just Django that Dreamhost doesn't support. They don't support the software that comes pre-installed on the shared server unless explicitly stated.

Bad support, dodgy service... stay away from Dreamhost if you can help it.

I tried and failed to get Django working on my Dreamhost account. The long-running-process issue bit me. I can't believe it actually works for some people! I tried and failed to get Trac running as well.

I would say that Dreamhost only supports CGI style apps. If you can get FCGI+long-running-processes to work for you, bravo!

Now I just use Dreamhost for all the PHP sites I have to host, and use Linode for all of my Django and CherryPy apps.

I have gotten a Django project up and running on Dreamhost, but there were a number of hurdles, and I still get an occasional hailstorm of "Can't connect to MySQL server" errors. I second mschurter's use of Linode, which rules.

Setting up a Django project on Dreamhost is horrible. Most of the libraries are outdated and they seem to kill long-running processes at some time.

Quote from the dreamhost wiki: "If Django is crucial to your site, you may wish to consider another host"

The "uname -a" string speaks for itself:

Linux krabappel 2.4.32-grsec+f6b+gr217+nfs+a32+fuse23+++p4+c6+gr2b-v6.192 #1 SMP Wed Dec 14 17:00:09 PST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

is it really this bad!

I'm not sure how dreamhost gets ranked this bad here.

I'm running django 1.0 there, without much trouble setting it up.

There are snags, most notably that dreamhost kills long-running processes, so the first visit to a site in a while will take ~10 seconds to load.

It's clearly not perfect, but it does run django, pretty decently, at a price that can't be beat. Support's been great for me, very responsive, and willing to help.

If you need a perfect production server for a big professional site, dreamhost's not for you. If you're running something smaller and/or are on a budget, they're definitely worth checking out.