Dreamhost Shared Hosting Servers: No WordPress Mu

Dreamhost could probably be the most popular web hosting company out there right now, with their aggressive marketing campaigns via coupon codes, their unlimited webspace and bandwidth, up-to-date server and program software and hardware, and a whole lot more features they have in the table. Add to that their cheap price.

I availed of their geocities promo lately, and got two years free domain and hosting for free.

But here’s the big turn-off. Just lately a notice was posted here saying:

NOTICE
WordPress MU is not allowed to be run on our shared hosting servers. If you intend on running this under your account, you are required to be on a Private Server.

I loved WordPress Mu. I may not have been successful in building a community out of it in the past (ok, just some several failed attempts) but I would like very much to deploy it to some future ventures/projects. And this is a total letdown for dreamhost. I was initially planning to transfer my sites to them after my webhosting expires with Bluehost.

Note, it is not only the wildcard dns that’s prohibited, now they’re totally banning everyone from installing it (WPMU). The software might have been rocking up their servers.

Is this the consequence of overloading your servers with too many users – that one they call overselling? I wonder.

No Comments

JeremyK@DH May 15, 2009 Reply

WP-MU causes HUGE problems on our servers. Also, most people set it up with promiscuous blog creation and spammers take them over creating hundreds of thousands of database tables causing havok for our database backups and the database server in general, not to mention polluting the internet with more cruft.

So, while you may think it sucks that we don’t allow it, think about the problems it creates for us and for our users.

deuts May 15, 2009 Reply

Thanks for the reply Jeremy. I understand the headache you are dealing with being in a webhosting business.

But you cannot generalize users in your box, right? I mean you can easily single out users that abuse and users that behave.

The users that don’t guard their wp-mu sites well can be the same users that don’t guard their blogs, forums, wikis, etc. that are also in your system from spammers. They can as well build any other website and take for granted and let the spammers grow into a spam land.

Andrea_R May 16, 2009 Reply

They said not on their *shared* servers. The dedicated ones they offer are just fine.

As we’ve said over and over again, you don’t want to run WPMU on a shared server anyway.

deuts May 16, 2009 Reply

Hi Andrea, unfortunately I don’t have the luxury to avail of a dedicated server or even a VPS for that matter. If you are resolved that I can’t or should not install WPMU in a shared server, then I can’t do anything about that.

It dawns to me now, WPMU is only for the elite. Even if you don’t even intend to open registration to the public. Just for personal or a very limited group purposes.

Anyway, thanks for visiting my site. I’m glad for the help.

Marti Abernathey October 23, 2009 Reply

thanks for publishing this. I’ve tried to repeatedly install this (i wasn’t aware DH didn’t support WPMU, as I’ve been with them for a while. The the only problem I have is logging in. I could upload the files and run the installer, I just couldn’t log in.

And Andrea_R, I’m on a shared file server, but have Dreamhost’s Private MYSQL server and it won’t let me finish the install… so I’m guessing you have to have both? For someone small like me (I’ve never had more than 6 bloggers at a time), I don’t generate enough money to pay for the MYSQL server, much less the private server.

JeremyK@DH, if it’s strictly a database issue, shouldn’t I be able to install it?

Leave a Reply