DreamHost Drop CPU minute restrictions
In its latest Newsletter, Dreamhost made a "crazy overselling decision" to drop CPU minute restrictions for their shared hosting accounts, a restriction which was set to 60 CPU minutes a day before. An interesting case since most of the current issues for shared hosting are related to sharing CPU and memory between the different users.
Some people point to our CPU Minutes FAQ in our wiki and say “Aha, you can only use up to 60 CPU minutes a day and then you’re disabled!” But that’s not true either. The truth is, it’s really always handled on a case-by-case basis. However, our customers really want to see a hard number.. so we put up 50-60 because you’re definitely not in trouble if you’re under that.”
So now here is how they deal with their CPU policy :
Well, we're sick and tired of people being sick and tired of getting disabled for "CPU minute" overages! ESPECIALLY when we don't even have any real set "CPU minute" levels for plans, or a tab on our web panel where you can track your usage.So "guess" what?! We've changed our "CPU minute" "policy" "for the better!" We no longer HAVE any limits on "CPU minutes". Maybe it's just semantics, and maybe it's just "crazy overselling", but as long as your site or scripts aren't causing problems with the server, you are IN THE CLEAR!
Just yesterday my hosting provider sent me another Abuse Report email for high CPU usage, and you know, after few months you say : It's enough ! It just so happens that my scripts require some CPU for few minutes, then during the rest of the month I almost don't use any CPU at all. It becomes very annoying every time you exceed your limits... you have to try to fix it or find another hosting provider. It doesn’t help that every time there is an abuse report, my account is moved to a temp server until the issue is resolved, and most of the time I loose data, some of my databases don't move...
So this decision made by Dreamhost is really courageous, and not as crazy as they announced in the newsletter [the buzz words !]. It's very intelligent not only for their customers who are now working with less restriction on the server, but also for Dreamhost who won't be emailing their users abuse reports every time they exceed 60 CPU minutes. Such issues could be harmful for the server if the account exceeds its limits for a very long period, but usually things like this happen for digg/slashdot effect for just a few minutes, then everything goes back to normal.
Before, we were primarily talking about overselling for disk space, now we talk more and more about overselling for CPU and memory... but the talk will always be about making the maximum profit from the same hardware configuration.
