Some days ago, some blogs hosted in Dreamhost have been letting us know of the problems they’re having with the “high CPU consumption”. For example, at La Maté por un Yogur (spanish)and Mangas Verdes (spanish too). That is, their sites are so visited and the requests to the database are so many, they’re making the Dreamhost servers work a lot. The situation is serious because, if they don’t manage to slow down their CPU consumption, their accounts will be deactivated, unless they move to a dedicated server (that costs US$ 99 per month).

Until now, Dreamhost had been making a brilliant use of blogs as marketing tools. They gave away codes with discounts, gave comissions for every person that subscribed though our user, etc. This strategy allowed them to capture a large number of people that build blogs with tools such as Wordpress and Movable Type. But what’s going on now shows that in fact they didn’t quite understand how interaction operates in the blogosphere.

Some might say there’s only 20 or 30 blogs with these issues. They’re probably right. The problem is that, precisely, these blogs are the ones with the most readers, higher ponderation in Google and Technorati, and usually are those able to get attention.

And many bloggers have turned to analyze the flaws of the Dreamhost service. For instance, for those of us who use dynamic applications, the max time frame they fix for their CPU servers uploading, of 30 or 40 minutes per day, is not enough to consume even the 10% of the resources of disks and data transference they provide. To put it bluntly: Dreamhost can broaden the storage space every week, and give you millions of domains and databases, but in the end all of this in useless, since you won’t be able to use it. Other criticize the fact that Dreamhost uses php.cgi to process the consults (spanish), which causes a big consumption of resources. Could it be that the problem is, as Minid states, Dreamhost and not Wordpress (spanish)?

As more Dreamhost users with largely visited blogs start presenting their problems with this hosting service, their marketing strategies will die quickly. And not only that: Dreamhost is presented as a Wordpress “friendly” service, and it’s one of the recommended sites at Wordpress.org. The interesting thing is that now they’re deactivating the account to … Wordpress users. No one is saying, of course, that they have to destinate unlimited resources to a site. They have to follow an equation of profitability. But it’s noticeable how many users are having problems with this hosting. Couldn’t it be that Dreamhost is responsible of its CPU consumption for their unfortunate decisions about php.cgi? I ask, as non expert user.

Summing it up: the issue threatens to ruin a good part of Dreamhost’s marketing accomplishments, and makes the users focus on the service’s deficiencies. And they publish it in sites with many thousands of visits per day. Doesn’t look good.

This blog uses Dreamhost. Among my different sites, I might reach 1500 daily visits. Yesterday I happened to look at my consumption, and it’s around 43 minutes of CPU. So, I’m crossing the limit. How long until they send me a warning? For now, I’ve taken a few preventive measures (remove some databases, install WP-Cache in mi Wordpress blogs, among others) but we’ll see if I manage to reduce my consumtion. Anyways, I’m still below the numbers Boja shows in La Maté por un Yogur, and other more popular blogs.

By the way, if you want to follow up this topic, you can use this search at Technorati.

Update: after the measures taken yesterday, of broadening the cache time of pages with WP-Cache, eliminating some of the databases and many plugins, the consumption went down to 20 minutes of CPU use. Let’s hope it stays that way. Anyways, I think Dreamhost will have to revise this issue, before more people -their users- start paying attention to it.