I’ve used Dreamhost for years (decade+) and don’t have anything but good things to say about them. Decent pricing, excellent performance, and generally very fast and reliable customer support.
However, if you’re using Elements to publish directly to Dreamhost, there’s one thing you need to know: do not interrupt a ZIP backup operation. Doing so will make your site unreachable from Elements (it still works fine for site visitors) until the daily reset.
I learned this the hard way. I was doing a bunch of small updates to a site, and eventually got tired of waiting for the backup to finish (I had it set to “backup every time”) so tried to cancel out of the backup from the Elements side. It appears that Dreamhost just left the channel open waiting for the backup to continue/conclude.
It means you’ll get a “Fail” report for all files trying to be sent to Dreamhost. Basically, you see Elements building the files, but then when it goes to push them, you get “Fails” on everything.
That sounds strange, seems like their server isn’t terminating the connection and leaving a zombie process opened up which might block further uploads, or your IP is getting temp banned… Neither should really be happening.
I believe it’s a zombie process problem. There’s just no simple way of terminating the process, so until they do it from their end, you can’t re-publish.
It’s not a big deal, just change your backup schedule to once a week and don’t try to terminate it from within Elements before it completes.
Perhaps not a big deal, but a compromise that shouldn’t need to be made… Backing up every time the site is published provides better data protection, and people shouldn’t get locked out of publishing if they want to skip that backup process from time to time…
