Don't go with DreamHost if you are running MySQL. I've had a DreamHost account for more than 4 years now, the one serious problem with DreamHost is that they run their MySQL servers and Apache servers are on separate machines. I'm talking about their standard shared hosting here. The problem with this is that your PHP script can't talk to the database on the "localhost" connection, it must actually go out over the network to talk with the MySQL server. This may not seem like a big deal, but, if you have a lot of MySQL queries that are required to generate a page your are adding a few to several miliseconds for each query. For me this made page loads for applications like phpGedView horiably slow. For my sites that use a lot of MySQL I use HE.net. Now that HE.net allows you to host multiple domains I may just move everything there.
Dream Host: Average of 0.255 ms per record to retrieve.
HE.net: Average 0f 0.008 ms per record to retrieve.
I use the following bit of PHP code to test the two servers.
$dbhost = '';
$dbuser = '';
$dbpass = '';
$dbname = '';
$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to mysql');
mysql_select_db($dbname);
// single big-hit test
$start=microtime(true);
$query = "SELECT * from pgv_families;";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$cache=array();
$c=0;
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC))
{
$cache[]=$row;
$c++;
}
$time=microtime(true)-$start;
print "Retrieving all {$c} records took {$time} seconds\n";
