DreamObjects follow up review

Let me quickly review what I found so far about DreamObjects.

First the good stuff

Using Apache Benchmark (yeah, screw you naysayers, it is what I have installed on my Fedora box) compared Amazon US-West and DreamObjects HTTP GET of a jquery file (90.5KB). I used AWS West (North California) region because dreamhost is still using the same DC in Brea as with other servers I suppose. At least the nslookup confirms that it is in the same city. I don’t know where the frack Brea is but it’s in the same state I assume.

On multiple runs I found AWS is slower in all areas. Note I am connecting from Singapore and this is a very rough benchmark, though it does give me a little more significant numbers as compared to say testing from US itself since I will always have higher latency. That being said just take it for what it is.

Connection Times: DreamObjects was faster by 30% in all connection stages.

Transfer rate: S3 was slower by almost 15%.

Longest request times: DreamObjects was faster in all percentages and at 90% time it was already 2x faster that S3. The longest request on S3 was over twice the time that it took DreamObjects to serve. Dreamobjects also consistently delivered the same request time over the entire test with only a small variation of 10% whereas S3 managed to frack it up and escalated gradually from the first 20% to 100% requests served in almost 2.5x the time. That is actually quite bad. I might have to reconsider our own production projects on S3. Interesting.

Errors: there weren’t any , in any case the number of requests are really small.

I was not benchmarking for performance/error rate but for throughput. I only used a very small sample test runs (5 each) with concurrency level of 10. It seems that requests per second are not very wide due to this.

But so far it looks DreamHost is outperforming Amazon S3 by a good margin. Then again dreamhost crawls when it has enough customers and sardine cans everyone so we don’t know what the future holds.

The Migration interface is quite awesome on their panel.

Bad Stuff

Not well thought out interface. Recursive deletes don’t work, couldn’t find a way to do recursive <anything>. Heck even I managed to do that on beta.3ezy.net. It’s not super hard.

They applied the same AUP http://dreamhost.com/acceptable-use-policy/ to DreamObjects as they use for Webhosting. The same T&C etc. So according to their own AUP you cannot use DreamObjects for backup, file hosting services, or image galleries etc. basically any web application allowing User uploaded content is off-limits.However their wiki states

Target Audience & Use-Cases

• Personal Backup - Users needing to store large amounts of data for personal backup of music, photos, videos, complete system backup, etc. Generally, these users will connect with a third-party application.

• Web Developerment - Developers of web applications needing object storage to easily augment or replace existing S3 or Swift functionality. Store images, logs, generated data and more via API with DreamObjects.

• WordPress Sites - Anyone with a WordPress site can automate site backups, upload images to any bucket, and use a shortcode to display images using the DreamObjects Connection plugin.

Yeah I am confused. Since I have had sites removed for bandwidth overage on Dreamhost image gallery before (and gallery2 used to be one click install), I moved to Amazon S3 or dedis. The TOS, AUP etc are pretty good for business on AWS, I know they shit-me-not. I hope Dreamhost figures this out.

Also they don’t support CNAME yet.

summary: Worth a shot for fun and games. don’t put anything sensitive there. Don’t use for backups or hosting anything you will ever need. At least not yet.

If you have a dreamhost account and if you can file a support ticket pointing out the AUP and other legalese issues. Fact is I do want to see some real competition to AWS. If dreamhost can clean up it’s act it can really put a dent on the largely monopolized Redundant cloud storage market.

Update 6th may 2013:

Dreamhost has responded regarding the confusing TOS/AUP issue:

Thank you for contacting technical support. I apologize for the confusion in regards to this. You can use DreamObjects for file storage like you do with Amazon. This does include images for a gallery, and backups, if you wanted to use it for that :) Here is some more information in regards to this:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/DreamObjects\_Overview

In regards to the CNAME. You can create a CNAME say objects.example.com that points to objects.dreamhost.com, then you would access your file as such:

objects.example.com/testbucket/test.jpeg

You can use any cname of course, as I used objects as an example :)

Hope this helps in regards and please let me know if there is anything else I can assist you with.

Thanks!

Jerry