Firstly, the author's Dreamhost account was used primarily for domain registrations.

Secondly, Dreamhost does provide VPSes with root access as well as web hosting and domain reg.

Thirdly, VPS isn't always the right solution. You have to account for time and willingness to do the sysadmin work -- instead of spending the effort on, say, programming or marketting.

Not everybody wants to spend several extra hours up front setting up and securing a server for a simple website or webapp.

And then patching it regularly and worrying about all sorts of things that may not be related to your goal in the slightest.

The point I'm confused about is how a VPS would have helped the original poster. Couldn't the hacker just request a password reset from the (obliging) tech support guys?

Yes, I wasn't thinking about "DreamHost VPS" (although come to mention it I do remember them offering such a service).

With most (read:good) VPS offerings the support guys won't have access to your VPS password (root, etc) and so from that perspective this would be safer and more secure for the OP. Shared hosting, by it's nature, holds a much higher chance of the hosting company holding your password in the clear/decryptable state.

My apologies if I wasn't clear in my original reply.

Exactly. Though I suspect that dotBen didn't realize that Dreamhost provides VPS too and thus the suggestion was to avoid Dreamhost altogether.

I use a VPS too, but even $19/mo is significantly more than DH -- I pay $119.00 or so for yearly renewal, which evens out to almost $10/mo. A VPS is $100 more per year, and if you're not using the host for anything more than having a web host around for storage, etc., as I do, it's not worth the extra $100 or the extra time spent in proper configuration.

Dreamhost is fine for what it offers. People hopefully don't think they can really run something big and serious on $9/mo, but it's a good easy out for people who just want some web space.

You're advocating an unmanaged solution to people who want managed services. Dreamhost are shit, but an unmanaged VPS is a huge time investment. Apples and Oranges.

There are managed VPS offerings. Another option would be to hire someone to set this up (prob 1hr work for someone remote).

Sure, I totally understand that this is over-kill if you are just running a personal blog - but then that's what wordpress.com etc are for. I'm working on the assumption that most people here on HN are either running a startup, a public facing project or building their personal brand -- all of which IMHO warrant setting things up properly.

As he said, he's using dreamhost mostly for domain registration, not for hosting.

Some of us aren't heavy web programmers.

I can vouch for dotBen's recommendation. I recently signed up with a VPS for the first time a year ago for a site I'm still in the progress of building. There are a ton of step-by-step guides and how-to resources that make getting up and running relatively easy and painless. You'll be overwhelmed by the options you'll have access to, but there's really only a handful of decisions you need to make to get started. Go for a Managed VPS and you don't even have to worry about keeping up with system upgrades and such.

There's of course, the added reward of having learned and accomplished something new.

Honestly, that doesn't matter.

Anyone who is the slightest bit technical would gain a lot from managing a VPS for their site. Even if you just want to host a bunch of wordpress blogs, or even static files.

You're glossing over the complexity of configuring email solutions. Though I'm not entirely certain if you're only advocating web hosting on a VPS with mail through something like Google Apps for Domains.

Things like Exim and Postfix are non-trivial to setup correctly and very easy to screw up the configs, at least in my experience; though most of the time that I've tried to configure them I was trying to get them to do non-standard things (like redirect all outgoing emails to non-whitelisted -- through a pattern/regex -- email addresses to a specific mailbox).

So you pay twice as much and have to do more work? Keeping my blog up-to-date is challenging enough as it is.

You discount the power of being lazy.

^_^